David Brooks Quotes

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.

Hillary Clinton is still - she's such a private person.

If we're in some sort of Hobbesian state of nature, where you just want a strong man who has no compassion Donald Trump is going to do a little better. So, we will figure out what game we're playing.

You figure out, what is the crucial issue facing the country right now? And for Trump, it was that the global economy and the international world order were failing regular people.

Parties that are majority parties are incoherent parties.

People ask, quite legitimately, why [Betsy] DeVos and why not a lot of the others? But it's because it has to do with the special interest groups that run a lot of Washington.

Would [Betsy DeVos] be my first pick? No. Is she someone who has dedicated her life to education policy? Yes, actually, she has.

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

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.

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.

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

Jeff Sessions has some problematic spots on his history, but he has been a pretty normal, respectable senator, more conservative than a lot of us, but a respectable senator for a long period of time.

Of those two [Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump], I do think that the - right now, at least in my mind, the Democratic theme is eclipsing the Republican one.

My colleague Ross Douthat wrote that any time you give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, he always lets you down.

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

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

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.

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.

I really think of [Donald] Trump erratic. I think that was the big message that came out. The positive agenda for Hillary [Clinton] was a little less vibrant.

For the Republican Convention, I think of Trump's speech and sort of the darkness, the fear of crime, the need for a strong arm really, and so that one core theme.

Labor-rich manufacturing doesn't exist anymore. Manufacturing jobs are white-collar, Silicon Valley programmers or highly-skilled technicians. They are not going to employ lots of people.

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.

I want to limit the effects of the power of donors, no question about it.

If you withdraw from the game, you're out of the game. And we have withdrawn from the game. And we said Bashar Assad has to go. He's going to stay. So we're out of the game.

If Donald Trump wants to fire somebody for not getting Obamacare repealed, he should fire himself.

Maybe you're willing to tolerate a lot of bigotry from Donald Trump if you say, just change things, just change things.

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

When a president speaks that usually means a lot.

If you thought Donald Trump was going to be swallowed up by the conventional Republican Party or by Washington, you were wrong.

We actually have to have a government. We have to have people confirmed and put into office.

For us going forward, it's to not reverse the dynamism of American society and the diversity. It's to pay attention to the people who are being ruined by it, and so this doesn't happen again.

I think globalization has been really good for America.