David Brooks Quotes

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.

If you do something really cognitively demanding, like buying furniture, it turns out buying furniture is one of the most difficult things we do. Go into a furniture store and look at a sofa.

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

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

It's impossible for one person to think of everything.

I want to make big films. That's always been my ambition.

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

I was really fortunate that I went to a high school where we actually had a film theory program.

As a director, I like trying to unlock the subtext of the scene and try to put the camera in a place that helps that.

I'm not a kicker and a screamer.

It's a completely irrational decision to drop out of school.

We have the choice to choose how we're going to educate our emotions.

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

If you know that most processing is below the level of awareness, you learn the value of sleep. You're brain is working on the problem anyway.

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.

I think the presidency is a bad way to measure the effective campaign finance, because in the presidency, there is so much publicity, there's so much money floating around.

If you grow up in a home where actions don't lead to predictable consequences, you don't develop strategies to control your impulses.

I'm a pundit. I'm, like, paid to be a narcissistic blowhard and be in front of the camera.

I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.

If I had to fault President [Barack] Obama, I would say that sometimes governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.

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.

When you're running for president you have to take some risks and you've got to show people something fresh and you've got to stay interesting.

Politics really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road.

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

I do think creating an open free-trade economy but with strong social support is the way to go.

I think Romney's foreign policy is sensible.

Populists love rich people. They just hate professionals.

Mitt Romney knows a lot. He's a very professional - a consummate professional.

The government is supposed to provide a level playing field where people can compete fairly. It's not supposed to cut deals with one company or another to do so.

I'm of course nostalgic for Barack Obama all of a sudden.

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

The Republicans in Congress, they believe in Ronald Reagan's Republican Party, not Donald Trump Republican Party or Steve Bannon's Republican Party.

Personally, I think Mitt Romney would be a great secretary of state.

We're no longer living in Tammany Hall America.

I learned I'm not a science writer. I'm not very good at describing how something is happening. I try to describe "So What?"

A heroic moral victory for the New York Mets. It may be the only kind of victory we're achieving this season, but he set a good example for professional athletes and the rest of us.

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.

Obamacare is woven into the fabric of health care. It's very hard to just rip it out, as Donald Trump sort of acknowledged with The Wall Street Journal.

Donald Trump's got to do some big changes, because what he was voted on. But when you think about how to do it, it would take massive expertise, which his people, believe me, do not have.

It's hard for parents just to measure schools.

I wasn't born with a tie or with Mark Shields stapled to my left hip. I have another life.

I think charter schools, choice, and frankly school standards need a champion.

Decision-making power, whether it's on foreign affairs or domestic affairs, is concentrated in the White House in a reasonably small circle.

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

The Republican Party has become an ethnic nationalist party.

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

Donald Trump's being authentic to what he ran on and what got elected.

Putin is someone who has been undermining the norms of what we consider the world order since he got into power and in increasing success.

What's interesting about the Trump administration is how bitterly divided they are in their attitudes towards Putin.

I think Barack Obama's foreign policy will be regarded more failure than success.