David Brooks Quotes

Plunder is morally wrong. It ruins your credibility.

I think globalization has been really good for America.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

The fact that there could be an ISIS West Bank, the fact that the Palestinian government in Gaza doesn’t even acknowledge Israel’s right to exist, the fact of constant terror, delegitimization campaigns in the Palestinian schools, these are all much bigger facts. And for the Barack Obama administration to focus on this one fact, almost, not to the expense, but to diminish some of the others which are much more important, is to cast all the blame on Israel and to take the U.N. policy toward Israel, which has been longstanding, and sort of surrender to it.

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

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.

I, personally, think Trump improved pretty dramatically and certainly changed pretty dramatically over the last hundred days. He’s less of the populist. He’s more of the corporatist. He’s less incompetent. He’s trying to at least turn toward people who can put a decision-making process. And he’s trying to adjust to the job. And so whatever one thinks of him, he is certainly a learning creature.