David Brooks Quotes

Americans have known about mounting inequality and king-sized Wall Street bonuses for years. But we also had an entire genre of journalism dedicated to brushing the problem off.

Capitalism is so successful economically that it creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.

Hating Wall Street is an American tradition that dates back even to the days when Thomas Jefferson cursed that money lover Alexander Hamilton. And for centuries, the complaints about it have largely stayed the same: 'It does nothing! It creates chaos! It's a parasite that sucks hardworking Americans dry!'

Occupy Wall Street means making Wall Street and the corporate power elite understand that the people affected by the binge of unregulated greed are not going away, and they are not going to give up.

I don't think anyone went the polls and said, 'I am casting my vote to make sure that Wall Street has better chances to make bigger profits off the backs of the American people.'

What we're seeing now is that greed is still alive and kicking, and banks are bigger than ever.

The post-crisis perception, at least in the media, appears to be one of Americans being held down by Wall Street, by big companies in the private sector, and by the wealthy. Capitalism is on trial. I see it a little differently. If a lender offers me free money, I do not have to take it.

The way the bankers have kind of toppled the way money is distributed, and taken most of it into their own hands, is as good as Stalin or Hitler.

Reckless capitalism kills black people.

I am going to fight capitalism even if it kills me. It is wrong that people like you should be comfortable and well fed while all around you people are starving.

Wall Street has too much wealth and political power.

I think the sense of fairness in humans is very strongly developed, and that's why we react so strongly to all the bonuses received by Wall Street executives. We want to know why they deserve these benefits.

If anyone’s declared class warfare, it’s the people who inhabit the top rungs of big corporations and Wall Street … They have declared it on average workers.

There’s a mal-distribution in wealth in this country. Entitlements end up going to the rich anyway. Some of them should be attacked. The ones who rip us off, the ones who get bailed out.

The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.

The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power.

There are persons who constantly clamor. They complain of oppression, speculation, and pernicious influence of wealth. They cry out loudly against all banks and corporations, and a means by which small capitalists become united in order to produce important and beneficial results. They carry on mad hostility against all established institutions. They would choke the fountain of industry and dry all streams.

You couldn't advance in a finance department in this country unless you thought that the world was flat.

After thirty years of a collapsing middle class,” he writes, “after thirty years of an economy designed to stack the deck in favor of the big guys; after thirty years of a political and constitutional system increasingly rigged to work for economic elites — after all this, the people revolted.

Thank you, Occupy Wall Street. With your vivid example of anticapitalist squalor, I've been able to convince all three of my children to become investment bankers.

If we want to revive and achieve the American Dream, we need to change a situation in which the people whose hard work makes this country run cannot earn a living wage, while bankers, speculators, and corporate elites - the real 'takers' in today's society - skim off far more than their fair share.

What we should all argue for is the use of freedom rather than having a monetary system with regulation domination that is run by a cartel and the special interests - that is the kind of system we have today.

Wealth plays out in the political sphere in all kinds of ways, often personally. Can Hillary Clinton represent the interests of working people when she and her husband have taken so much money from Wall Street? Was Mitt Romney's private-equity business too ruthless with workers?

Class envy is dangerous.

I think that capitalism in general is responsible, not for the worldwide recession, but for a lot of suffering, both in the United States and around the world.