David Brooks

“Nearly every parent on earth operates on the assumption that character matters a lot to the life outcomes of their children. Nearly every government antipoverty program operates on the assumption that it doesn’t.”

“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.”

“People with character are capable of long obedience in the same direction, of staying attached to people and causes and callings through thick and thin. People with character also have scope. They are not infinitely flexible, free-floating, and solitary. They are anchored by permanent attachments to important things. In the realm of the intellect, they have a set of permanent convictions about fundamental truths. In the realm of emotion, they are enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves. In the realm of action, they have a permanent commitment to tasks that cannot be completed in a single lifetime.”

“Moderation is based on the idea that things do not fit neatly together. Politics is likely to be a competition between legitimate opposing interests. Philosophy is likely to be a tension between competing half truths. A personality is likely to be a battleground of valuable but incompatible traits.”

“Her genius derives from the fact that she was capable of the deepest feeling but also of the most discerning and disciplined thought.”

“They finally achieve a sort of outward-facing union.”

“Fixate on whole cultures, not specific pieces of poverty. No specific intervention is going to turn around the life of a child or an adult in any consistent way, but if you can surround a person with a new culture, and different web of relationships, then they will absorb new habits of thought and behavior in ways you will never be able to measure or understand. And if you do surround that person with a new, enriching culture, then you had better keep surrounding them with it, because if they slip back into a different culture, and most of the gains will fade away.”

“Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.”

“What family you were born into matters so much more than it did before in a perverse way.”

“Learning was a by-product of her search for pleasure”

“Her characters tend to err when they reject the grubby and complex circumstances of everyday life for abstract and radical notions. They thrive when they work within the rooted spot, the concrete habit, the particular reality of their town and family.”

“[T]he road to character is built by confronting your own weakness.”

“there was perhaps a strain of humility that was more common then than now, that there was a moral ecology, stretching back centuries but less prominent now, encouraging people to be more skeptical of their desires, more aware of their own weaknesses, more intent on combatting the flaws in their own natures and turning weakness into strength.”

“As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.”

“This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.”

“The rich don't exploit the poor. They just out-compete them.”

“(A middle-class child's) parents didn't just give him money. They passed down habits, knowledge, and cognitive traits.”

“Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from and adapt to failure.”

“Women, in general, are less visually aroused than men, a trait that has nearly cut the market for pornography in half.”

“The imagination simplifies our endless desires and causes us to fantasize that they can be fulfilled.”