David Brooks Quotes

Politicians love to beat up on guys that are seen to be public enemies, if you will. That's a great way to get elected.

People expect Byzantine, Machiavellian logic from politicians. But the truth is simple. Trial lawyers learn a good rule: 'Don't decide what you don't have to decide.' That's not evasion, it's wisdom.

And what always struck me about that war period was how even Churchill had to talk socialism to keep up people's morale.

Politicians read the polls that show 85 or 90 percent of the voters profess a belief in God, so they identify themselves with religion, often only to the degree necessary to reach the constituency they are targeting.

There's something just so kind of smooth about politicians.

I've gotten to believe it's more fun to play politicians than actually be them.

Everyone wants to demagogue everyone else. That may be good politics, but it's awful policy.

Barack Obama's life was so much simpler in 2009. Back then, he had refined the cold act of blaming others for the bad economy into an art form. Deficits? Blame Bush's tax cuts. Spending? Blame the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No business investment? Blame Wall Street.

In politics, being ridiculous is more damaging than being extreme.

I talked to the rest of the nation for about ten minutes about what Lyndon Johnson was doing for the people of the Northeast. In truth, I thought I was laying it on a bit thickly. But when I returned and spoke with the President, he mentioned several points I could have added. I learned that it was simply not possible to lay it on too thickly for him (or most other politicians).

Politicians often confuse what sounds good with what really works.

Roosevelt, if he had lived, would probably have been unbeatable, despite the inevitable reaction against the war. He was so expert a demagogue that it would have been easy for him to divert the popular discontent to some other object. He could have been beaten only by a demagogue even worse than he was himself.

The “cant” of the politician, like the cant of the “religious” man, is also protean in its guise, but its chief method is to explain away words. The politician can always show you that he didn’t mean what he says, but something rather different from what he says. Political cant consists in pretending to agreement with hearers, whoever they may be. This cant is part of the stock-in-trade of every politician, be he Tory, Whig, or Radical, and it is by its means that he tries to haul in stray votes.

The most successful political candidates will be those who can tap American anger without becoming a target.

I don’t think that politicians should use words like ‘global economic crisis’ because some times when you do, you make a crisis where there was none before.

The art of leading the vulgar, in itself, does no discredit to its practitioner. Lincoln practiced it unashamed, and so did Webster, Clay, and Henry. What is more, these men practiced it with frank allowance for the naïveté of the people they presumed to lead.

A politician wants to come off as a happy warrior. To be contemplative seems almost effete, fancy – dispiriting somehow to much of your audience. He [Barack Obama] is not afraid to be this way at all.

Political demagogues will seek popularity by public speeches full of insult to foreign countries, and yellow journals will seek to increase their circulation by appeals to prejudice against foreigners.

As politicians, we're very, very much trained to say something and stick with it.

When a politician uses the word 'folks,' we should brace ourselves for the deceit, or worse, that is coming.

The thing is, it's much easier to be a rightwing populist than a leftwing one, because the left always have to explain why things are the way they are. The right can just blame the foreigners.

There is no such thing as a nonpolitical speech by a politician.

The problem is some of the populism on both the far left and the far right, it can make a Tweet but not make a policy. And, you know, when you are dealing with issues that are as important and serious as this, I understand why people search for simple solutions.

Remember, politicians get votes by promising everything to everyone, always at the expense of some other invisible taxpayers.

The usual pattern of demagogues is to promise the moon, fail to deliver, and then blame vulnerable others for those failures.