David brooks quotes

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

We have rapidly increasing technology, which is making life very good for people who are good at using words, and not so good for people who are not good at using words.

People tend to marry people with similar-width noses, eyes similarly apart, with complementary immune systems.

The policies of the Democratic Party have always been in cultural consonance with the culture of the working class. And, somehow, they missed that.

There are plenty of team players in government who do whatever the leader says. There are too few difficult members, who have complicated minds, unusual perspectives, the toughness to withstand the party-line barrages and a practical interest in producing results.

We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.

Pain now is better than pain deferred.

When you're in governance, you understand the limitations and the complexities of governance.

Donald Trump is sort of an Orwellian figure, an authoritarian figure who is twisting words in an Orwellian manner, "1984," to exercise power and control people's minds, or is he a 5-year-old who has an ego that needs to be fed, and the universe has to warp around his ego needs so he can feel good about himself, and everybody has to produce photos to make the monarch feel like he's made of gold.

The point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts, it's to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.

You have to have a plan, or else you're just creating a recipe for chaos.

To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.

I think Romney's foreign policy is sensible.

Donald Trump is so egregious in the way he talks about women, the way he allegedly treated women.

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

Almost every successful person begins with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so.

Students are too busy jumping through the next hurdle in the résumé race to figure out what they really want. They are too frantic tasting everything on the smorgasbord to have life-altering encounters. They have a terror of closing off options. They have been inculcated with a lust for prestige and a fear of doing things that may put their status at risk.

The moral foundation of the society, the way we interact with each other is more fundamental than the Supreme Court.

I expect [Donald] Trump to do what he's done very successfully, which is, whether you like him or not, he will be the dominant player .

Live life as a series of revelations

When a president speaks that usually means a lot.

Donald Trump has a pre-modern monarchic family structure. His business is a monarchy with family members all around. His administration is a monarchy with family members all around.

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.

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

If you're cutting deals with one company or another, eventually, there's going to be a quid pro quo. There's going to be a bribe. There's going to be something.

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.

If you're running a successful administration, then you're loyal to people who are basically good who make a mistake. And that seems to be essential for any organization. And it should be essential if this were a normal administration, rather than a fiefdom, where everybody simply tries to give Donald Trump a good headline every day.

The roots of great innovation are never just in the technology itself. They are always in the wider historical context. They require new ways of seeing. As Einstein put it, 'The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.'

It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?

What you hear in focus groups and conversations, people will give you 20 minutes of rage about how the borders are out of control. But then you start saying, practically, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about the 11 million here? What are we going to do to get some workers we need for the farms? Then people start having a normal conversation.

The brain is not the mind. It is probably impossible to look at a map of brain activity and predict or even understand the emotions, reactions, hopes and desires of the mind.

I think Americans expect optimism in their leadership. The most popular and effective leaders, whether it was Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or Jack Kennedy, brought to it a sense of optimism and possibility.

It's hard to imagine a party that is not corrupted by hatred.

Freedom without structure is its own slavery.

I wouldn't say philosophy and theology are dead. Brain science doesn't invent new philosophies but it helps remind us which of our existing philosophies are more true.

Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure

What's sort of remarkable is that, especially in the Israel and the Russia cases, you have got a U.S. citizen, Donald Trump, siding with a foreign leader against the U.S. president. There is a reason why president-elects have tried to remain mute during their transitional periods, relatively, because you just don't want to be for somebody - some other country against your own government, and especially when you're about to take the helm of that government.

I could tell you that when you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you'll settle it by flipping a coin. But don't go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails?

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.

If done correctly, these techniques can allow the Bobo pilgrim to have 6 unforgettable moments a morning, 2 rapturous experiences over lunch, 1,5 profound insights in the afternoon (on average), and .667 life-altering epiphanies after each sunset.

If you just rely on one model, you tend to amputate reality to make it fit your model.

Your DVD collection is organized, and so is your walk-in closet. Your car is clean and vacuumed, your frequently dialed numbers are programmed into your cordless phone, your telephone plan is suited to your needs, and your various gizmos interact without conflict. Your spouse is athletic, your kids are bright, your job is rewarding, your promotions are inevitable, everywhere you need to be comes with its own accessible parking. You look great in casual slacks.

What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.

People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic.

Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.

Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.

The three people who are most often talked about with Hillary Clinton, whether it's Tim Kaine or Vilsack or Cory Booker, they are three extremely nice people.

Charter schools are public schools. They're paid for publicly and they're part of the public system. They just have a more independent structure.

Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive.

One of the things I think about with Donald Trump is what are his words actually attached to? With Trump, I'm not sure the words have roots. They are emanations of his psyche, but has he thought it through? Is there an argument, is there a policy implication?

Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.

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.

[Betsy DeVos] is quite a smart person, capable, pretty sophisticated in subtle thought. And so to me, that puts her in the realm of policy. But we're in a climate where, as today, she tries to visit a school, and she can't even do that because protesters are blocking that.

The effectiveness of a group of people is not determined by their IQ but by how well they communicate.

If you do have to look at polls, you should do it no more than once every few days, to get a general sense of the state of the race. I've seen the work on information overload, which makes people depressed, stressed and freezes their brains. I know that checking the polls constantly is a recipe for self-deception and anxiety.

The drugs are just growing all around the country, and so, it all feeds into problems that are not just urban, but are just spread throughout the country.

It's always dangerous to overinterpret what Donald Trump says at any one moment.

The crossroads where government meets enterprise can be an exciting crossroads. It can also be a corrupt crossroads. It requires moral rectitude to separate public service from private gain.

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

If there is a series of attacks like that or, God forbid, if ISIS is really sending soldiers across Europe and maybe across the world for a barrage of these things, then the political climate is revolutionized here. And maybe the [Donald] Trump speech will look like a precursor to a climate that we're all about to walk into.

Stairway to Wisdom”) David Brooks detailed the needed ingredients to gaining a deep understanding of a social problem, beginning with the data and moving on to first-hand accounts. The highest rung on his stairway, though, went beyond those: “Empathy opens you up to absorb the good and the bad. Love impels you not just to observe but to seek union—to think as another thinks and feel as another feels.

In my view, success is earned externally by being better than other people. But character, that sort of unfakeable goodness, is earned by being better than you used to be. And it's about self-confrontation.

I have come to think we have to treat Donald Trump's tweets like Snapchat. It's just something that is going to go away. And it flies out of some region of his brain and it goes out into the ether. And usually it's on the realm of media.

Donald Trump just needs the ego fed all the time.

I sort of feel we have to owe some respect to the process and owe some respect to the electorate and the people who voted Donald Trump, on the assumption that they have something to teach us.

I've come to think that flourishing consists of putting yourself in situations in which you lose self-consciousness and become fused with other people, experiences, or tasks.

People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.

The legitimacy of a war is not established by how it is organized but by what it achieves.

We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?

I think the Republican budget priorities are messed up. I salute for the way they're attacking some of the entitlement programs, but they are taking huge cuts, by pretending they're just block-granting it to the states, out of Medicaid, from the least fortunate.

Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.

Woe to you who insults the intelligence community, if you're president.

We don't have the choice to control our emotions, but we do have the power to educate our emotions. And we do that through literature and through art and music to give ourselves a repertoire of emotional experiences.

Most poverty and suffering - whether in a country, a family or a person - flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it

The rich don't exploit the poor, they just out-compete them.

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.

The ugliness can sometimes be super ugly, but also a warning sign of something down below.

The more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them.

There is a virtue in shamelessness.

The message of the summoned life is that you don't need to panic if you don't yet know what you want to do with your life. But you probably want to throw yourselves into circumstances where the summons will come.

Clearly, politics is a team sport. Trump is not so much of a team player.

For those of us who believe in it, there has to be a movement that says, "We still believe in trade. We still believe in international engagement for America. But for those losers or those who are suffering, we've got your back."

You have a country that is 20 percent liberal, 40 percent conservative. You have a country where maybe 22 percent have faith in government. If you're a liberal, it's just going to be tough. And you should just expect that. And it's tough for people on the right, too, because they don't get what they want either if you're, say, a libertarian. So, you have got the country sort of against you. And, nevertheless, you have a president.

America has an important role to play as the world leader in creating a global order, free trade, free waterways, free commerce, free movement of people. That happens because of U.S. military might.

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.

If we are going to stop wars on this earth, we are going to have to make war on hunger our number one priority.

We still are America though. We're still a country that is a country of social mobility. We're still a country of immigrants. We're still a country with common ancestors. And reviving the civics of America and the idea that we're going to be united, at least not right now, but in some common future, and talking in that hopeful way that Martin Luther King did, that Abraham Lincoln did, seems to me that's the way.

Things that change history tend to be organized.

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.

Every White House I have covered since Reagan, when I got here, power has been more concentrated in the White House than the one before.

Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.

People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.

The politics is broken up and down. And Trump may emerge from a reality TV world that is much more powerful than we think. And there is the prospect that this is where we are, which is an horrific thought.

... trash talk ... Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

Bill Clinton pandered by telling you what you wanted to hear. John Kerry panders by never telling you what you don't want to hear. This is negative pandering; he talks a lot without really ruling anything out so you can draw your own conclusions.....Kerry has been talking for years, and yet such is the thicket of his verbiage that he has achieved almost complete strategic ambiguity.

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

The zooming wealth of the top 1 percent is a problem, but it's not nearly as big a problem as the tens of millions of Americans who have dropped out of high school or college. It's not nearly as big a problem as the 40 percent of children who are born out of wedlock. It's not nearly as big a problem as the nation's stagnant human capital, its stagnant social mobility and the disorganized social fabric for the bottom 50 percent.

We shouldn't just allow gay marriage. We should insist on gay marriage. We should regard it as scandalous that two people could claim to love each other and not want to sanctify their love with marriage and fidelity.

The people who really have character make deep, unshakable connections to something outside themselves.

Emotion is the foundation of reason.

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

Plunder is morally wrong. It ruins your credibility.

Donald Trump's ego is like a comet the size of Jupiter just traveling through the solar system, and we all have to be affected by its gravitational pull.

The key factor separating geniuses from the merely accomplished is not a divine spark. It's not I.Q., a generally bad predictor of success, even in realms like chess. Instead, it's deliberate practice. Top performers spend more hours (many more hours) rigorously practicing their craft.

America is not just a democracy, it represents a certain culture of competitive mobility and personality aspirations, politics is not merely a clash of interests, but a clash of dreams.

Bibi Netanyahu, froze the settlements and offered to go toward a two-state solution. The Palestinians didn't take him up on it. Historically, we have had a series of these offers. And the settlements themselves are not the keystone here. It seems to me myopic and bizarre that at the last moment, the Barack Obama administration would surrender the whole balanced array of policies that are obstacles to peace and focus on the one that is most detrimental to Israel.

Donald Trump is this whirling dervish of chaos. He picked a fight with Mexico. Germany is not far behind. He will pick a fight with them. He will pick a fight with China, which would be truly cataclysmic.

I came to the conclusion is that we have a very shallow view of human nature in the policy world. We're really good at talking about material things, really bad at talking about emotions, really good at stuff we can count, really bad at the deeper stuff that actually drives behavior.

People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.

How can we expect young people to be rooted in things such as character, morality and honesty? How is one supposed to be at once an arrow soaring skyward and an oak planted firmly in the ground? The meritocratic culture hones strivers on every aspect of their lives save one - how to cultivate character.

Highly educated young people are tutored, taught and monitored in all aspects of their lives, except the most important, which is character building. When it comes to this, most universities leave them alone.

It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero

I think the Barack Obama position and the majority position of American Jews and a lot of Americans is a two-state solution between Israel and Palestine. Settlements get in the way of that. If they're not stopped soon, there is no prospect for that type of solution.

People have been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK."

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.

You have got to be loyal to people beneath you.

The madman theory is that you can be a successful deterrer if you - if they think you could be crazy. And so I think it can be very effective, so long as you're not actually crazy.

Empathy makes you more aware of other people's suffering, but it's not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.

For the Democrats, they're trying to avoid having the Sanders-Clinton debate over and over again. But, to some degree, they're sentenced to that debate. Clinton is much more embracing of the global economy and the international world order. Sanders and Warren are much less so. And they have got to figure out which side the party is on, if they're going to have a clear message. I think this is probably one you probably can't straddle.

We know the 65-point policy points, to the extent that they exist, but is Hillary Clinton willing to be vulnerable, is she willing to be funny, is she willing to be both authoritative, but also real? And so less what she says than the emotional tone she sets. It takes a lot of confidence to be a vulnerable speaker on this stage. And sometimes she hasn't always projected the confidence it takes to be in some ways weak. But that's what I think people were looking for, that moment of human connection.

[Betsy DeVos] does care about charter schools, which are public schools. She does care about choice, which is a perfectly legitimate thing to care about. It's because it's the one issue where the Democratic donor base was really energized, which was the teacher unions.

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

It is especially painful when narcissists suffer memory loss because they are losing parts of the person they love most.

Recovering from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully into their art, loved ones and commitments.

The daily activity that contributes most to happiness is having dinner with friends. The daily activity that detracts most from happiness is commuting. Eat more. Commute less.