David Brooks Quotes - Page 9

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.

I have seen [Betsy DeVos] present a few times. I don't really know her. But I have seen her present on education policy, and she's not a stupid person.

Politics really is a team sport. You really have to work the whole system to get somewhere down the road.

If you know that most processing is below the level of awareness, you learn the value of sleep. You're brain is working on the problem anyway.

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?"

Some children lack tools to see their course in the world in far-sighted ways. Just introducing school vouchers won't change that. You have to have nurse-home partnerships, early childhood education, mentoring programs and so on. People learn from people they love.

If you grow up in a home where actions don't lead to predictable consequences, you don't develop strategies to control your impulses.

We have an international system. We all profit from it. Trade profits from it. Peace. We can travel around the world because of it. And part of that system is certain ideas, the certain ideas you can't invade other countries for no reason. You can't commit genocide. You can't - rogue regimes can't have nuclear weapons, and you can't gas your own people.

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.

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

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.

People who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic. They have some issue. They have some interest. It may be world peace. It may be preserving carried interest. But it's not altruistic.

No matter where you are on politics, I think it is wonderful to see candidates funding campaigns not by talking to a very small number of very rich people, but by reaching out to a very large number of citizens.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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