Top 250 David Brooks Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope; Republican ones to rage.”

— David Brooks

202. “What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?”

— David Brooks

203. “Geoffrey Miller notes that most adults have a vocabulary of about sixty thousand words. To build that vocabulary, children must learn ten to twenty words a day between the ages of eighteen months and eighteen years. And yet the most frequent one hundred words account for 60 percent of all conversations. The most common four thousand words account for 98 percent of conversations. Why do humans bother knowing.”

— David Brooks

204. “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

205. “Most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

207. “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

208. “When unattached to the right ends, communities can be more barbarous than individuals.”

— David Brooks

209. “Adam I achieves success by winning victories over others. But Adam II builds character by winning victories over the weaknesses in himself.”

— David Brooks

210. “We can choose the narrative we tell about our lives. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. We’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control. We’re sometimes thrust into social conditions that we detest. But among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to organize perceptions.”

— David Brooks

211. “The imagination offers up ideal visions of experiences which then leave us disappointed when the visions don’t come true.”

— David Brooks

212. “President Obama was the first president not to abide by the limits in the general election.”

— David Brooks

213. “It’s just a lot safer to be an incumbent. So I think they have used the campaign finance reforms. They have passed laws that will help themselves stay in office. And I think that’s one of the flaws that we do have in the system.”

— David Brooks

214. “The people with this disposition believe that wisdom begins with an awareness of our own ignorance. We can design habits, arrangements, and procedures that partially compensate for the limits on our knowledge.”

— David Brooks

215. “Fundamentalism is still on the march.”

— David Brooks

216. “In her memoirs she writes that she left the hospital job because it eventually made her numb to suffering, and it left her no time to write. She neglected.”

— David Brooks

217. “We all know the love you have for the truth should be higher than the love you have for popularity.”

— David Brooks

218. “People tend to want to live up to their friends’ high regard.”

— David Brooks

219. “During my years caring for patients, the most common pathology I saw was not heart disease or diabetes; it was loneliness.” The psychological, social, and moral toll caused by this detachment is horrific.”

— David Brooks

220. “It’s a completely irrational decision to drop out of school.”

— David Brooks

221. “It’s impossible for one person to think of everything.”

— David Brooks

222. “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.”

— David Brooks

223. “It’s not that worldly achievement and public acclaim are automatically bad, it’s just that they are won on a planet that is just a resting place for the soul and not our final destination. Success here, acquired badly, can make ultimate success less likely, and that ultimate success is not achieved through competition with others.”

— David Brooks

224. “The incumbents just have a ton more money because they have rigged the system to help themselves, because they have these networks of small donors. Meanwhile, the amount of people, the incumbents being reelected has just been – that has been going up and up and up.”

— David Brooks

225. “I wasn’t born with a tie or with Mark Shields stapled to my left hip. I have another life.”

— David Brooks

226. “People who live according to the pure code of honor are not governed by the profit motive; they are governed by the thymotic urge, the quest for recognition. They seek the sort of glory that can be won only by showing strength in confrontation with death.”

— David Brooks

227. “Young Arab men are not going to walk away from extremism because they can suddenly afford a Slurpee. They will walk away when they can devote themselves to a some call to serve a cause that connects nationalism to dignity and democracy and transcends a lifetime.”

— David Brooks

228. “I think Americans expect optimism in their leadership. The most popular and effective leaders, whether it was Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or Jack Kennedy, brought to it a sense of optimism and possibility.”

— David Brooks

229. “If you just rely on one model, you tend to amputate reality to make it fit your model.”

— David Brooks

230. “Expertise is about forming internal connections so that little pieces of information turn into bigger networked chunks of information. Learning is not merely about accumulating facts. It is internalizing the relationships between pieces of information.”

— David Brooks

231. “Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive.”

— David Brooks

232. “If you can create a social movement that people want to join, they will bend their energies and ideas to you.”

— David Brooks

233. “As a director, I like trying to unlock the subtext of the scene and try to put the camera in a place that helps that.”

— David Brooks

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

— David Brooks

235. “The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything.”

— David Brooks

236. “We have the power to choose narratives in which we absolve ourselves of guilt and blame everything on conspiracies or others.”

— David Brooks

237. “In their best moments they understood that they would become guilty of self-righteousness because their cause was just; they would become guilty of smugness as their cause moved successfully forward; they would become vicious and tribal as group confronted group; they would become more dogmatic and simplistic as they used propaganda to mobilize their followers; they would become more vain as their audiences enlarged;.”

— David Brooks

238. “If it feels all right for you, it’s probably OK.”

— David Brooks

239. “While it pretends not to, it subliminally sends the message that those who are smarter and more accomplished are actually worth more than those who are not.”

— David Brooks

240. “It was easier to come to maturity when there were more well-defined philosophical options.”

— David Brooks

241. “I want to make big films. That’s always been my ambition.”

— David Brooks

242. “Souls are like athletes that need opponents worthy of them, if they are to be tried and extended and pushed to the full use of their powers.”

— David Brooks

243. “Researchers have done a lot of work over the past few years analyzing social networks. It turns out almost everything is contagious. If your friends are obese, you are more likely to be obese. If your friends are happy, you’re more likely to be happy. If your friends smoke, you smoke. If they feel lonely, you feel lonely.”

— David Brooks

244. “In his essay “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Nietzsche wrote that the way to discover what you were put on earth for is to go back into your past, list the times you felt most fulfilled, and then see if you can draw a line through them.”

— David Brooks

245. “You lose the ability to say a hundred noes for the sake of one overwhelming and fulfilling yes.”

— David Brooks

246. “Britain is blessed with a functioning political culture. It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous.”

— David Brooks

247. “There must be some supreme creative energy, he thought, that can take love and turn it into synapses and then take a population of synapses and turn it into love. The hand of God must be there.”

— David Brooks

248. “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?””

— David Brooks

249. “I think that it’s an arguable position, whether with Hamas and ISIS around, whether there should be a Palestinian state, but it’s a defensible position, given the current circumstances.”

— David Brooks

250. “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.”

— David Brooks