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Most poverty and suffering - whether in a country, a family or a person - flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it

David Brooks

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David Brooks
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 22
Editor
Journalist
Politician
Pundit
City of Toronto
Country
Moral
Accomplishment
Coercion
Hard
Suffering
Result
Restore
Whether
Flow
Measures
Family
Physical
Accumulation
Social
Habit
Flows
Order
Poverty
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Persons
Takes
Artificial
Disorganization
Person
Results
Habits
Dissolved

More quotes by David Brooks

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Putin's an egomaniac, so there are two ways he can process his ego mania. He can say, Oh, I stood up to the U.S., or, Hey, I'm essential to the world order.
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Israel is a country of six million people. They need the U.S. It used to be bipartisan on Israeli politics. You never messed with that relationship. The fact that [ Benjamin] Netanyahu is willing to do that, I thought would horrify voters more than it turned out it did.
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If you're running a successful administration, then you're loyal to people who are basically good who make a mistake. And that seems to be essential for any organization. And it should be essential if this were a normal administration, rather than a fiefdom, where everybody simply tries to give Donald Trump a good headline every day.
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My colleague Ross Douthat wrote that any time you give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt, he always lets you down.
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Every time Kellyanne Conway goes on TV, there's another fight with whoever's interviewing her that particular day.
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Civility is the natural state for people who know how limited their own individual powers are and know, too, that they need the conversation.
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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.
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Russia has a very sophisticated, advanced attack on U.S. businesses and U.S. government and U.S. institutions. And it's not like Donald Trump is going to be walking away from this. He will be spending a lot of time on it, if he's any sort of normal president.
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There is the English language and then there's the Trump language.
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It's rare in an administration for a secretary of state and a secretary of defense to get along really well.
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I generally think debates within a party should not be treated as a scandal. They should be treated as a sign of strength, to be honest.
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A wise soul once declared that the ultimate power of the writer is that he has the choice of whom he wants to be co-opted by.
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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 who give money in large amount in politics are basically not altruistic.
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Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.
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On the [Betsy] DeVos case, I agree that the gun - her gun position is kind of weird, kind of crazy, but I do think she does know about public schools.
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One of the frustrations about the modern world is that we don't even have a good vocabulary to describe our state. The word sentiment sounds mushy. [...] Sentiment is not mushy.
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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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Freedom without structure is its own slavery.
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Barack Obama won such a big electoral mandate because a lot of people thought he was - transcended partisan and ideological barriers and was going to put aside the old debates. So, he was able to get a lot of moderates and a lot of independents.
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