David Brooks Quotes

People used to complain that selling a president was like selling a bar of soap. But when you buy soap, at least you get the soap. In this campaign, you just get two guys telling you they really value cleanliness.

I think we are all disgusted by the way George W. Bush's administration has allowed honesty and candor to seep into the genteel world of international affairs.

People generally don't suffer high rates of PTSD after natural disasters. Instead, people suffer from PTSD after moral atrocities. Soldiers who've endured the depraved world of combat experience their own symptoms. Trauma is an expulsive cataclysm of the soul.

That is the job of the Catholic Church, to be a balance to the materialistic drives of our culture and of economy.

Research by Donald A. Redelmeier and Sheldon M. Singh has found that, on average, Oscar winners live nearly four years longer than nominees that don't win.

The reason the Betsy DeVos case was the centerpiece case for the Democrats wasn't about her weakness as a knowledgeable person on education policy.

When your institution is under assault, you're feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don't turn inward, go outward.

I want to try to make big films that hopefully connect with people.

Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.

No matter where you are on politics, I think it is wonderful to see candidates funding campaigns not by talking to a very small number of very rich people, but by reaching out to a very large number of citizens.

Who could have predicted this, that the presidency is kind of a hard job? Nobody knew that. I also like the fact that Trump is a detail-oriented person. I find his interviews amazing. He's actually kind of remarkably candid.

Marital happiness is far more important than anything else in determining personal well-being.

I think Trump's attention span is super low. I don't think he has the expertise to actually run a foreign policy.

I think the voters who voted for Donald Trump certainly are willing to tolerate a lot of ugliness, but maybe, if you're in desperate circumstances, or you think America is deeply in trouble, you're willing to tolerate that without necessarily liking it.

If it's all win-loss, then you do whatever you can to win and to make money and to beat the deal.

We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.

Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure

The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born.

Emotion is the foundation of reason.

The North Korean regime is extremely fiery, extremely insecure, sometimes hysterical. And when you're around somebody who's screaming and unstable, the last thing you want to do is add to the instability with your own unstable, hysterical rhetoric.

Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

I do think Hillary Clinton should have pivoted and say, I am change, I am change, because people do want some change.

Barack Obama won such a big electoral mandate because a lot of people thought he was - transcended partisan and ideological barriers and was going to put aside the old debates. So, he was able to get a lot of moderates and a lot of independents.

Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.

Through American history, we have had populist movements that often, often, often have this ugly racial element. But, often, there are warning signs of some deeper social and economic problem.

It's almost inherent, but I'm a massive Stanley Kubrick fan. I'm a big admirer of what guys like Christopher Nolan have been able to do. For me, to be able to try to make big films that reach a lot of people, and that hopefully have something to say, is a lofty goal, but that's my goal.

The question is whether Donald Trump recognizes that Vladimir Putin is a bad guy. And I guess there's no indication that he regards Putin as in any way a bad guy.

The idea that a big country is going to go out and send troops into some country to take their resources, and then the rest of the world is going to somehow trust us is just a ridiculous notion.

Israel is a country of six million people. They need the U.S. It used to be bipartisan on Israeli politics. You never messed with that relationship. The fact that [ Benjamin] Netanyahu is willing to do that, I thought would horrify voters more than it turned out it did.

The Republican Party has become an ethnic nationalist party.

I happen to think most people go into government do it for the right reasons and they really do things as they see them on the merits of the issues.

It's rare in an administration for a secretary of state and a secretary of defense to get along really well.

The things that make them similar - their machismo, their expansionary braggadocio - is going to turn them I think into bitter and dangerous enemies. We will look back on this moment where we thought Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump were sort of close as a moment of bitter irony, when they get into a schoolyard display against each other, amping up each other's worst tendencies and putting the two countries in some sort of scary position.

Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views.

One of the things this world is finding is that emotion is the basis of reason. We really have to trust our emotions, which are much smarter than our reason in some ways.

I think Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana was a case of that, who was an outstanding administrator.

Russia has a very sophisticated, advanced attack on U.S. businesses and U.S. government and U.S. institutions. And it's not like Donald Trump is going to be walking away from this. He will be spending a lot of time on it, if he's any sort of normal president.

It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.

Populists hate journalists, they hate teachers, they hate lawyers, but they tend to like rich people. There's something deeply consistent.

The brain writes the autobiography of our species at the conscious level.

Those cultural wars, Sexual Revolution issues are fading from the scene, and the coming generation has basically settled them.

I'm a little uncomfortable with the idea of judges overruling presidents on national security matters.

What Bannon and Trump have presented us with is an idea of America that's not been the traditional idea, not the Walt Whitman idea, not the George Washington, Abraham Lincoln idea, which is one of welcoming because we're the last, best hope of Earth.

Donald Trump just needs the ego fed all the time.

If you go in a confirmation process, you're going to be asked about the embarrassing or stupid things you said. You should have a view.

President Obama was the first president not to abide by the limits in the general election.

I generally think debates within a party should not be treated as a scandal. They should be treated as a sign of strength, to be honest.

Things that change history tend to be organized.