Top 280 David Brooks Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “I do think British and American politics rhyme. They go in cycles. They go in Thatcher-Reagan cycles, Blair-Clinton cycles.”

— David Brooks

152. “I don’t think history will ever be a science because history will never be reduced to law-like behavior. People are to unpredictable.”

— David Brooks

153. “I don’t know if I’m sexist, though I have not paid much attention to the women’s bracket.”

— David Brooks

154. “Agency is not automatic. It has to be given birth to, with pushing and effort.”

— David Brooks

155. “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.”

— David Brooks

156. “The school asks a person who has achieved a certain level of career success to give you a speech telling you that career success is not important.”

— David Brooks

157. “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.”

— David Brooks

158. “Today, the word “sin” has lost its power.”

— David Brooks

159. “Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views.”

— David Brooks

160. “Political freedom is great. But personal, social, and emotional freedom – when it becomes an ultimate end – absolutely sucks. It leads to a random, busy life with no discernible direction, no firm foundation, and in which, as Marx put it, all that’s solid melts to air. It turns out that freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side – and fully commit to something.”

— David Brooks

161. “People want reality that tells them how right they are all the time.”

— David Brooks

162. “Edmund Burke argued that people who have never looked backward to their ancestors will not be able to look forward and plan for the future. People who look backward to see the heroism and the struggle that came before see themselves as debtors who owe something, who have some obligation to pay it forward.”

— David Brooks

163. “I think the Republican budget priorities are messed up. I salute for the way they’re attacking some of the entitlement programs, but they are taking huge cuts, by pretending they’re just block-granting it to the states, out of Medicaid, from the least fortunate.”

— David Brooks

164. “The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles.”

— David Brooks

165. “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.”

— David Brooks

166. “Emotion is the foundation of reason.”

— David Brooks

167. “It’s not that Egypt doesn’t have a recipe for a democratic transition. It seems to lack even the basic mental ingredients.”

— David Brooks

168. “Harold had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.”

— David Brooks

169. “Epistemological modesty.”

— David Brooks

170. “Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America’s inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country’s inability to govern itself.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

172. “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.”

— David Brooks

173. “A dozen voices from across the institution told students that while those who lead flat and unremarkable lives may avoid struggle, a well-lived life involves throwing oneself into struggle, that large parts of the most worthy lives are spent upon the rack, testing moral courage and facing opposition and ridicule, and that those who pursue struggle end up being happier than those who pursue pleasure.”

— David Brooks

174. “The less you agree with the policies of your superiors, the more energy you must direct to their accomplishment.”

— David Brooks

175. “The world is immeasurably complex and the private stock of reason is small.”

— David Brooks

176. “He subsumed his own desires for the sake of the group.”

— David Brooks

177. “If you live in a society like ours, in which people seldom object if they hear someone taking the Lord’s name in vain but are outraged if they see a pregnant woman smoking, then you are living in a world that values the worldly more than the divine.”

— David Brooks

178. “We’re not bad. But we are morally inarticulate.”

— David Brooks

179. “Often, I go and see films where I can see the beats coming. So, if I read something where I don’t see the beats coming and it takes me somewhere unexpected, that’s a great thing to build upon.”

— David Brooks

180. “The joy, as C. S. Lewis put it, is not the satisfaction of the longing but the longing itself.”

— David Brooks

181. “The more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them.”

— David Brooks

182. “That same year Murray Barrick, Michael Mount, and Timothy Judge surveyed a century’s worth of research into business leadership. They, too, found that extroversion, agreeableness, and openness to new experience did not correlate well with CEO success. Instead, what mattered was emotional stability and conscientiousness – being dependable, making plans, and following through.”

— David Brooks

183. “The Germans have a word for this condition: Zerrissenheit – loosely, “falling-to-pieces-ness.” This is the loss of internal coherence that can come from living a multitasking, pulled-in-a-hundred-directions existence. This is what Kierkegaard called “the dizziness of freedom.” When the external constraints are loosened, when a person can do what he wants, when there are a thousand choices and distractions, then life can lose coherence and direction if there isn’t a strong internal structure.”

— David Brooks

184. “Friends usually bring out better versions of each other. People feel unguarded and fluid with their close friends.”

— David Brooks

185. “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.”

— David Brooks

186. “As some people joke, we may not possess free will, but we possess free won’t.”

— David Brooks

187. “It is possible to have a complex human relationship without words.”

— David Brooks

188. “We are primarily the products of thinking that happens below the level of awareness.”

— David Brooks

189. “The great works of art and literature have a lot to say on how to tackle the concrete challenges of living, like how to escape the chains of public opinion, how to cope with grief or how to build loving friendships. Instead of organizing classes around academic concepts – 19th-century French literature – more could be organized around the concrete challenges students will face in the first decade after graduation.”

— David Brooks

190. “When you’re running for president you have to take some risks and you’ve got to show people something fresh and you’ve got to stay interesting.”

— David Brooks

191. “This is the inverted logic of people who see around them a fallen world. The midcentury thinker most associated with this ironic logic is Reinhold Niebuhr. People like Randolph, Rustin, and King thought along Niebuhrian lines, and were influenced by him. Niebuhr argued that, beset by his own sinful nature, man is a problem to himself. Human actions take place in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension.”

— David Brooks

192. “We live in a culture that encourages us to be big about ourselves, and I think the starting point of trying to build inner goodness is to be a little bit smaller about yourself.”

— David Brooks

193. “When your institution is under assault, you’re feeling like the weight is on it and the history might be flowing away, don’t turn inward, go outward.”

— David Brooks

194. “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.”

— David Brooks

195. “Pride deludes us into thinking that we are the authors of our own lives.”

— David Brooks

196. “I’m thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.”

— David Brooks

197. “Consider the possibility that a creature of infinite love has made a promise to us. Consider the possibility that we are the ones committed to, the objects of an infinite commitment, and that the commitment is to redeem us and bring us home.”

— David Brooks

198. “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.”

— David Brooks

199. “When you’re running for president, you’re a guest in the living room for four years. And if people don’t think you’re going to be around the living room as a pleasant experience, they’re not going to vote for you even if they agree with you.”

— David Brooks

200. “Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.”

— David Brooks