David Brooks
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.Collection: Alone
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.Collection: Dreams
What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.Collection: Family
The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.
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.
To explain the unknown by the known is a logical procedure; to explain the known by the unknown is a form of theological lunacy.
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.
People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.
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.
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.Collection: Inspirational
The people who really have character make deep, unshakable connections to something outside themselves.Collection: Character
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Views
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.Collection: Destiny
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.Collection: Character
Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.Collection: Important
People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic.Collection: People
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.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
The Republican Party has become an ethnic nationalist party.Collection: Party
Live life as a series of revelationsCollection: Live Life
Pain now is better than pain deferred.Collection: Pain
It’s only useful to ask, what wisdom have you learned from your misjudgments that will help you going forward?Collection: Helping
Woe to you who insults the intelligence community, if you're president.Collection: Community
Creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks... when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.Collection: Creativity
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.Collection: World
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.Collection: Honesty
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.Collection: Country
We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.Collection: Thinking
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?Collection: Graduation
Friendship allows you to see your own life but with a second sympathetic self.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Practice
I think the twenty-first century happened, basically. That this century started on 9/11. And basically, it's been a century of counter reaction to globalization and the meritocracy. And a good century for 72 nations have gotten more authoritarian. We've had Brexit. We have Le Pen rising in France. We've just got a lot of these types all around the world. And the people who are suffering from globalization and the meritocracy are saying, "No more. You know, we get a voice too."Collection: Thinking
What's interesting about the Trump administration is how bitterly divided they are in their attitudes towards Putin.Collection: Attitude
I can't imagine that being in the Trump Cabinet will be a very important job. I do think this will be a White House-run administration with a teeny-tiny group of people surrounding him, including his family maybe.Collection: Thinking
There certainly is a pattern of administrations that have good transitions, George W. Bush to Barack Obama, and administrations that have really bad transitions, I would say Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy. I would say this is beginning to look like a bad transition, from Barack Obama to Donald Trump as they begin to argue even at the presidential level, which is more or less unprecedented.Collection: Presidential
It's part of Donald Trump's psychodynamics to always care about his press coverage intensely. He's more interested in that than anything else.Collection: Care
Basically, global capitalism, basically to support it, or is it to be opposed? Is international order to be supported, or is it to be opposed? Republicans have taken a very clear line. Democrats can have a different version of the line, or they can just say, no, we are the party of international peace and activism, and we're the party that's going to have a civilized capitalism.Collection: Party
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.Collection: Country
Donald Trump's world view is that it's a dangerous, miserable place, people are out to get him, and he needs to strike them first.Collection: Views
The idea that Russia felt emboldened and apparently fearless to go into our election and manipulate our own election process, whether successfully or not, is a sign that they are outside the norms of normal society.Collection: Russia
What Bannon and Trump have presented us with is an idea of America that's not been the traditional idea, not the Walt Whitman idea, not the George Washington, Abraham Lincoln idea, which is one of welcoming because we're the last, best hope of Earth.Collection: Ideas
Certainly, the country can't have two presidents at once, so the tradition has been to hang back if you're the president-elect and wait for your time in office. [Donald] Trump is not a hang-back kind of guy.Collection: Country
[Donald Trump] has shifted - President [Barack] Obama has shifted American policy in a much more critical way in Israel with the settlements than the previous presidents.Collection: Israel
President-elect [Donald] Trump's ambassador to Israel is further to the right than almost anyone in Israel, further to the right than Bibi Netanyahu on the settlements, and almost opposes the two-state solution, doesn't he?Collection: Israel
The more attention Hillary Clinton gives to the country, the less people seem to like her.Collection: Country
I would have swapped out Donald Trump's frontal cortex for somebody else's for a little more self-control.Collection: Self
A lot of people think Barack Obama should have responded to the Russian hacking of the U.S. elections weeks ago, months ago. So these happened on his watch. There's nothing wrong with him dealing with it.Collection: Thinking