David Brooks famous quotes

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

#Successful #Two #Belief

When you're running for president, you're a guest in the living room for four years. And if people don't think you're going to be around the living room as a pleasant experience, they're not going to vote for you even if they agree with you.
-- David Brooks

#Running #Thinking #Years

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.
-- David Brooks

#Brain #Mind #Desire

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.
-- David Brooks

#Running #People #Interesting

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.
-- David Brooks

#Art #Commitment #People

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

#Feelings #Inward #Weight

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

#Atheism #Logical #Form

When your institution is under threat, you feel you have a lot of hostility, you feel things are slipping away, you have got internal problems, there's a tendency to turn inward and to focus on yourselves.
-- David Brooks

#Focus #Inward #Slipping

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.
-- David Brooks

#Jumping #Race #Lust

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

#Military #Order #Play

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.
-- David Brooks

#Destiny #Life Is #Acknowledge

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

#Civilization #President #Faults

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.
-- David Brooks

#Buying #Furniture #Looks

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

#Writing #Wife #Guy

Since 2005, a majority of Americans, according to the Gallup poll, have said it was wrong and a mistake to go into Iraq.
-- David Brooks

#Mistake #Iraq #Majority

Trade agreements are a net benefit for the world, and a net benefit for our foreign policy, and in the long run, given the dislocations, are a net benefit for us, too.
-- David Brooks

#Running #Agreement #Long

I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Clinton #Blair

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.
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Optimism #Leader

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

#Media #Culture #Jackals

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

#Eye #People #Noses

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

#Writing #Brain #Levels

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

#Choices #Emotion #Educate

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

#Thinking #Impossible #Persons

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

#Ambition #Want #Film

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.
-- David Brooks

#Goal #People #Guy

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

#People #Trying #Want

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

#School #Film #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.
-- David Brooks

#Trying #Cameras #Directors

Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don't see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that's a great thing to build upon.
-- David Brooks

#Unexpected #Film #Beats

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

#Art #Emotional #Giving

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

#Gps #Littles #Way

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

#Way #World #Emotion

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.
-- David Brooks

#Views #Talking #World

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

#School #Decision #Irrational

I'm not a kicker and a screamer.
-- David Brooks

#Kickers

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

#Gun #Who I Am #Expression

I think there are two basic approaches you can use for campaign finance. One is complete openness, everybody knows absolutely everything, but no limits. But you let people decide.The other is just have a national public system.
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Two #People

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

#Issues #People #Giving

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

#People #Giving

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

#President #Limits #Firsts

The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction.
-- David Brooks

#Revenge #Hatred #Natural

One of the things capitalism does is, it does enhance and exacerbate the sin of pride, making yourself, the material world the center of your universe, instead of God's will.
-- David Brooks

#Pride #Doe #World

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

#Jobs #Catholic #Balance

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

#Confused #School #White

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

#Soul #Dollars #Equal

Most people don't form a self and then lead a life. They are called by a problem, and the self is constructed gradually by their calling.
-- David Brooks

#Self #People #Calling

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.
-- David Brooks

#People #Soul #Soldier

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

#Blessed #School #People

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

#Helping

My SUV, assuming Hummer comes out with a model for those who find the current ones too cramped, will look something like the Louisiana Superdome on wheels. It'll guzzle so much gas as I walk out to my driveway there will be squads of Saudi princes gaping and applauding. It'll come, when I buy it, with little Hondas and Mazdas already embedded in the front grillwork.
-- David Brooks

#Squad #Louisiana #Looks

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity. But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.
-- David Brooks

#Giving #Weakness #Conformity

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

#Effectiveness #People #Groups

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

#Reality #Fit #Models

We live in a culture that encourages us to be big about ourselves, and I think the starting point of trying to build inner goodness is to be a little bit smaller about yourself.
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Trying #Culture

A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.
-- David Brooks

#Wise #Writing #Choices

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

#Wall #Hero #Community

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.
-- David Brooks

#Moving #Thinking #Hands

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

#Smart #Courageous #Debate

The school asks a person who has achieved a certain level of career success to give you a speech telling you that career success is not important.
-- David Brooks

#Inspirational #Graduation #School

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.
-- David Brooks

#Talking #Years #Interesting

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.'
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Technology #Roots

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.
-- David Brooks

#Hate #Scary #Want

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

#Character #Ideas #Knowing

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

#Way #Matter #Born

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

#Reality #People #Want

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 you explain the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year
-- David Brooks

#Summer #School #Home

Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure
-- David Brooks

#Pleasure

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

#Thinking #Levels #Awareness

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

#Memories #Loss #Suffering

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

#Character #People #Important

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.
-- David Brooks

#Teacher #Discipline #World

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

#Views #Genius #Prevailing

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

#Simple #Narrative #Imbalance

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

#Egypt #Recipes #Ingredients

The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.
-- David Brooks

#Rich #Poor

The public is not only shifting from left to right. Every single idea associated with the educated class has grown more unpopular over the past year. . . . A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.
-- David Brooks

#Party #Past #Years

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.
-- David Brooks

#Dream #America #Personality

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.
-- David Brooks

#Keys #Practice #Genius

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.
-- David Brooks

#Two #People #Guy

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

#Gay #Two #People

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.
-- David Brooks

#Self #Race #People

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?
-- David Brooks

#Graduation #Emotional #Mind

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

#People #Miracle #Commonality

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.
-- David Brooks

#School #Class #Self

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.
-- David Brooks

#Class #Views #Voters

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.
-- David Brooks

#Thinking #Self #People

The core threat to democracy is not in the White House, it's the [Bush] haters themselves.
-- David Brooks

#White #House #Democracy

I've observed a few things about the few really great people I've had a chance to meet and cover...They need to be around people. You and I require sleep. They require people.
-- David Brooks

#Sleep #Funny Graduation #People

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

#Creativity #Ideas #People

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.
-- David Brooks

#Jobs #Kids #America

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.
-- David Brooks

#Graduation #Dinner #Commuting

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.
-- David Brooks

#Inspirational #Graduation #Needs

This is how life works. Deciding whom to love is not an alien form of decision-making , a romantic interlude in the midst of normal life. Instead, decisions about whom to love are more intense versions of the sorts of decisions we make throughout the course of our existence, from what kind of gelato to order to what career to pursue. Living is an inherently emotional business.
-- David Brooks

#Love Is #Emotional #Order

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.
-- David Brooks

#Morning #Sunset #Average

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.
-- David Brooks

#Winning #Average #Years

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.
-- David Brooks

#Honesty #Character #Arrows

Big Brother is not the only danger facing the country. Another is the rising tide of distrust, the corrosive spread of cynicism, the fraying of the social fabric and the rise of people who are so individualistic in their outlook that they have no real understanding of how to knit others together and look after the common good.
-- David Brooks

#Country #Brother #Real

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

#Marriage #Important #Well Being

If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK.
-- David Brooks

#Feels

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

#Honesty #Thinking #World