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Courage is the most important virtue because it is the hardest.

David Brooks

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David Brooks
Age: 63
Born: 1961
Born: August 22
Editor
Journalist
Politician
Pundit
City of Toronto
Hardest
Courage
Virtue
Important

More quotes by David Brooks

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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
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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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Donald Trump's got to do some big changes, because what he was voted on. But when you think about how to do it, it would take massive expertise, which his people, believe me, do not have.
David Brooks
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Democrats in environmental agencies tend to be more sensitive to environmental harm. And Republicans tend to be more sensitive to business harm.
David Brooks
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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
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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.
David Brooks
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Trump has picked the more extreme versions of all Republicans so far, the more aggressive. And I think the thing to watch out for is, I could totally paint a scenario where Trump runs an authoritarian regime. I can totally paint a scenario where he has no control over his own government.
David Brooks
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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.
David Brooks
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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
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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.
David Brooks
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Even in this nuclear thing, [ Donald Trump] says we should be stronger and expand. What does that mean? So, what is concrete in what he's saying?
David Brooks
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The effectiveness of a group of people is not determined by their IQ but by how well they communicate.
David Brooks
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Some children lack tools to see their course in the world in far-sighted ways. Just introducing school vouchers won't change that. You have to have nurse-home partnerships, early childhood education, mentoring programs and so on. People learn from people they love.
David Brooks
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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.
David Brooks
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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.
David Brooks
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We actually have to have a government. We have to have people confirmed and put into office.
David Brooks
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Memo to young journalists: Democratic victories are always ascribed to hope Republican ones to rage.
David Brooks
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I want to try to make big films that hopefully connect with people.
David Brooks
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I do think trying to live each day as a bunch of moral occasions, did I live up to what I would hope, and, if I didn't, what can I do tomorrow to be a little better, I do think we can improve. We get better at life as we get older.
David Brooks
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The natural human reaction is to greet hatred with hatred, revenge by revenge. That's the natural genetic reaction.
David Brooks