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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

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David Brooks
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 22
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City of Toronto
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More quotes by David Brooks

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We pretend to be a middle class, democratic nation, but in reality we love our blue bloods. ... We love the prep school manners, the aristocratic calm, the Skull and Bones mystery, the dappled lawns stretching before New England summer homes. How else can be explained the Bush vs. Kerry match-up that confronts us this year?
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I happen to think most people go into government do it for the right reasons and they really do things as they see them on the merits of the issues.
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I've argued that Trump's biggest success in his first 100 days was to keep the Russia story at bay, toss out whatever it takes to push the story back, including those false charges that Obama had his wires tapped.
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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.
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Fundamentalism is still on the march.
David Brooks
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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.
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The Republican Party has become an ethnic nationalist party.
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I think Donald Trump is going to find it very hard to do the kind of massive change he wants.
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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.
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I do think creating an open free-trade economy but with strong social support is the way to go.
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I don't blame the Democrats for fighting. They have got a very energized base. And there is a lot to complain about a lot of these nominees. But I think, if you are actually going to turn someone down from a president's [Donald Trump] own Cabinet, it better be a lot more egregious than the cases we have seen.
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People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.
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The madman theory is that you can be a successful deterrer if you - if they think you could be crazy. And so I think it can be very effective, so long as you're not actually crazy.
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People have been raised in a morality that says, If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK.
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Putin is someone who has been undermining the norms of what we consider the world order since he got into power and in increasing success.
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If Donald Trump wants to fire somebody for not getting Obamacare repealed, he should fire himself.
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I think as we interpret him and frankly as the world learns to interpret Donald Trump, are these just words that are enigmatic things floating on air or are they actually shifts in policy and will they change moment by moment, day by day without any underlying connection to the actual stuff of governance? I don't know.
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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?
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With a normal president like President [Barack] Obama, he says a word, and that's because there has been some thought that he's done and there had been policy papers and there's been aides and there's been advisers and then there is a connection to an actual set of policies. And so, the words like have roots into actual stuff.
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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