Top 100 David Brooks Quotes
#1. I tend to cut David Brooks more slack than most people I know do, and I do it for one main reason. He can write. He's the best writer on that page, and I'd usually rather read him than others on that page I'm more likely to agree with.
Michael Tomasky
#2. David Brooks's The Social Animal. I recommend chapters 3 through 9, which give a far richer account than what I think about the subject.
Mark M. Weber
#3. She was carried along by events, not reflecting on them, just letting them sweep over her.
David Brooks
#4. aridity of her own marriage at that point or her profound
David Brooks
#5. In this method, you don't ask, What do I want from life? You ask a different set of questions: What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do? In this scheme of things we don't create our lives; we are summoned by life.
David Brooks
#6. Trash talk ... Washington floats on a river of aspersion.
David Brooks
#7. I don't think the Palestinians are in this position they're in, divided with Hamas and the P.A., unwilling to allow - or recognize Israel as a Jewish state.
David Brooks
#8. If they would put love of truth above love of career.
David Brooks
#9. If you live in a society like ours, in which people seldom object if they hear someone taking the Lord's name in vain but are outraged if they see a pregnant woman smoking, then you are living in a world that values the worldly more than the divine.
David Brooks
#10. You should start your life with the illusion that you are completely in control of what you do. You should finish life with the recognition that, all in all, you got better than you deserved.
David Brooks
#11. If the article mentions some celebrity-perhaps a recently dead politician-the author will want to mention some pointless detail from her last meeting with that person or the emotions she experienced when learning of the subject's death.
David Brooks
#12. 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.
David Brooks
#13. They turn nature into an achievement course, a series of ordeals and obstacles they can conquer. They go into nature to behave unnaturally. In nature animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort. But Bobo naturalists flee comfort and seek cold and deprivation.
David Brooks
#14. The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction.
David Brooks
#15. Sometimes, you go - you achieve a few things in life. I have achieved more career success than I ever experienced or that I ever thought. And I just realized, it doesn't make you happy. It's an elemental truth. It's so true.
David Brooks
#16. A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50% more time to complete it and make 50% more errors.
David Brooks
#17. Not shackled to a one-track mind, he always applied two, three, or four
David Brooks
#18. Dan P. McAdams argues that children develop a narrative tone which influences their stories for the rest of their lives. Children gradually adopt an enduring assumption that everything will turn out well, or badly, depending on their childhood.
David Brooks
#19. The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the [Bush] haters themselves.
David Brooks
#21. Some people think humility is thinking lowly of yourself. Some people think it's not thinking about yourself. But, to me, the best definition of humility is radical self-awareness from a distance, seeing themselves from a distance and saying, what's my problem?
David Brooks
#22. (A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.
David Brooks
#23. There are heroes and schmucks in all worlds. The most important thing is whether you are willing to engage in moral struggle against yourself.
David Brooks
#24. She was artificially narrowing herself, amputating every humane and tender piece that didn't fit into a rigid frame.
David Brooks
#25. When you cover politics, you realize that knowing how to talk about character matters more and more. The way we hold ideas is more important than the ideas.
David Brooks
#26. Most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.
David Brooks
#27. The imagination offers up ideal visions of experiences which then leave us disappointed when the visions don't come true.
David Brooks
#28. The prevailing view is that geniuses are largely built, not born.
David Brooks
#29. It's impossible for one person to think of everything.
David Brooks
#30. 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.
David Brooks
#31. Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure
David Brooks
#32. Most poor people in America are white. The family breakdown issue is an issue that crosses all sorts of racial lines. High school dropout issues. But because of the flow of events which involve the racial component, we've sometimes confused racial issues with other issues which are trans-racial.
David Brooks
#33. Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.
David Brooks
#34. Harrison had turned social awkwardness into a form of social power.
David Brooks
#35. Every virtue can come with its own accompanying vice. The virtue of reticence can yield the vice of aloofness.
David Brooks
#36. 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.
David Brooks
#37. Populism and elitism are the same thing. They are class prejudices, crude class prejudices that so-and-so, because they are uneducated, is less worthy, or so-and-so, because they are richer or more educated, is unworthy.
David Brooks
#38. 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.
David Brooks
#39. Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.
David Brooks
#40. People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.
David Brooks
#42. Always take your job seriously, never yourself.
David Brooks
#43. Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.
David Brooks
#44. We are all fundamentally equal souls, and if you make a zillion dollars, you're not any better than anybody else spiritually. You're still an equal soul.
David Brooks
#45. It's easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.
David Brooks
#46. With the case of [Mike] Pence, giving a little aurora of likability to a candidate, a lead candidate who's a little lacking in that department.
David Brooks
#48. Take a bucket, fill it with water, Put your hand in - clear up to the wrist. Now pull it out; the hole that remains Is a measure of how much you'll be missed ... . The moral of this quaint example: To do just the best that you can, Be proud of yourself, but remember, There is no Indispensible Man!24
David Brooks
#49. I want to try to make big films that hopefully connect with people.
David Brooks
#50. They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don't need to prove anything to the world:
David Brooks
#51. Britain is blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.
David Brooks
#52. What we have before us then, is three distinct purposes for a university: the commercial purpose (starting a career), Stephen Pinker's cognitive purpose (acquiring information and learning how to think) and (William) Deresiewicz's moral purpose (building an integrated self).
David Brooks
#53. People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic.They have some issue. They have some interest.It may be preserving carried interest. But it's not altruistic.
David Brooks
#54. The parental relationship sits outside the
the logic of meritocracy and is the closest humans come to grace.
David Brooks
#55. The inner struggle against one's own weaknesses is the central drama of life.
David Brooks
#57. In 1948, psychologists asked more than 10,000 adolescents whether they considered themselves to be a very important person. At that point, 12 percent said yes. The same question was asked in 2003, and this time it wasn't 12 percent who considered themselves very important, it was 80 percent.
David Brooks
#59. David ran through concrete advantages. And then set aside the practical. The pragmatist was gone, replaced by the poet and mystic.
Geraldine Brooks
#60. First, they had good character. They were energetic, honest, and dependable. They were persistent after setbacks and acknowledged their mistakes.
David Brooks
#61. 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.
David Brooks
#62. Some children lack tools to see their course in the world in far-sighted ways. Just introducing school vouchers won't change that. You have to have nurse-home partnerships, early childhood education, mentoring programs and so on. People learn from people they love.
David Brooks
#63. Sin is also a necessary piece of our mental furniture because sin is communal, while error is individual.
David Brooks
#64. Sin is not some demonic thing. It's just our perverse tendency to fuck things up, to favor the short term over the long term, the lower over the higher.
David Brooks
#65. 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.
David Brooks
#66. I wasn't born with a tie or with Mark Shields stapled to my left hip. I have another life.
David Brooks
#67. Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.
David Brooks
#68. The people who really have character make deep, unshakable connections to something outside themselves.
David Brooks
#69. I take a benign view of digital connectedness. I notice in most young people's lives, Facebook and such doesn't replace normal dating or hanging out, it just facilitates it.
David Brooks
#70. Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.
David Brooks
#71. I do think economic and social anxiety is the number one issue. And I'm pretty confident Hillary Clinton will be really riding that train pretty hard.
David Brooks
#72. I was really fortunate that I went to a high school where we actually had a film theory program.
David Brooks
#73. The gun becomes this psychological totem, this thing of who I am. And it's almost as if using the gun is going to be the thing that's going to be my expression of how I make a difference in the world.
David Brooks
#74. I make honorable things pleasant to children. A teacher from Sparta
David Brooks
#75. We have the choice to choose how we're going to educate our emotions.
David Brooks
#76. I want to make big films. That's always been my ambition.
David Brooks
#77. The struggle against the weakness in yourself is never a solitary struggle. No person can achieve self-mastery or his or her own.
David Brooks
#78. Our emotions tell us what to value. They're like a little GPS system: Go that way. Don't go that way.
David Brooks
#79. 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.
David Brooks
#80. Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks ... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.
David Brooks
#81. 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.
David Brooks
#82. If you think you can organize your own salvation you are magnifying the very sin that keeps you from it.
David Brooks
#83. In the educated class even social life is a series of aptitude tests; we all must perpetually perform in accordance with the shifting norms of propriety, ever advancing signals of cultivation.
David Brooks
#84. 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.
David Brooks
#85. Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.
David Brooks
#86. There are no free and democratic and wealthy countries in the world that have US rate of gun violence. We have to worry about loners and alienated people. We have to do better on mental health.
David Brooks
#87. The technology's going to change, but what people want to read is going to be basically the same.
David Brooks
#88. 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.
David Brooks
#89. You can't build rich lives simply by reading sermons or following abstract rules. Example is the best teacher. Moral improvement occurs most reliably when the heart is warmed,
David Brooks
#91. I'm not the most emotionally attuned guy in the world. My wife says that me writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony.
David Brooks
#92. People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.
David Brooks
#93. Alice had to be small to enter Wonderland.
David Brooks
#94. Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives.
David Brooks
#96. Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.
David Brooks
#97. It's a completely irrational decision to drop out of school.
David Brooks
#98. Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.
David Brooks
#99. I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.
David Brooks
#100. 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
David Brooks
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