David Brooks World Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the frustrations about the modern world is that we don't even have a good vocabulary to describe our state. The word sentiment sounds mushy [but] sentiment is not mushy.

If there is a series of attacks like that or, God forbid, if ISIS is really sending soldiers across Europe and maybe across the world for a barrage of these things, then the political climate is revolutionized here. And maybe the [Donald] Trump speech will look like a precursor to a climate that we're all about to walk into.

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.

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.