David Brooks may refer to:
What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.
Empathy makes you more aware of other people's suffering, but it's not clear it actually motivates you to take moral action or prevents you from taking immoral action.
Woe to you who insults the intelligence community, if you're president.
Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.
People want a reality that tells them they're right all of the time.
Donald Trump's being authentic to what he ran on and what got elected.
I just think, realistically, there's a lot of room outside the Trump populist right and the Bernie-Sanders-Elizabeth-Warren populist left. There are a lot of us who believe in open trade, open borders, a dynamic forward-looking economy, not a nostalgic economy, but do want to provide a significant level of social service or sort of economic Milton Friedman foreign policy, Ronald Reagan domestic policy, Franklin Roosevelt. And there's a lot of room in the center.
Donald Trump's ego is like a comet the size of Jupiter just traveling through the solar system, and we all have to be affected by its gravitational pull.
I think charter schools, choice, and frankly school standards need a champion.
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?
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 idea that when you correct a fact, you erase that fact from people's memories is the reverse of the truth. When you correct a fact, what you do is you further lodge that fact into people's minds, and they remember the error.
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.
We still are America though. We're still a country that is a country of social mobility. We're still a country of immigrants. We're still a country with common ancestors. And reviving the civics of America and the idea that we're going to be united, at least not right now, but in some common future, and talking in that hopeful way that Martin Luther King did, that Abraham Lincoln did, seems to me that's the way.
If Donald Trump is just tweeting about a union guy, then he's just being the bully we have seen. But if he uses the power of the presidency to back up some of those tweets and he's really, really coming down with a hammer on people he doesn't like using the power of the presidency, then we're seeing something very new and very different.
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.
Freedom without structure is its own slavery.
Donald Trump tried to set up this debate where it was going to be globalists vs. nationalists, and the Republicans were going to be the nationalists. But, if anything, the Democrats looked more patriotic and more nationalist at the end of these two.
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?
Bragging about what a good deal you got is one of the many great art forms that my people, the Jews, have introduced to American culture.