From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Brooks may refer to:

• David Brooks (actor) (1917-1999), American actor and stage director and producer
• David Brooks (author) (born 1953), Australian author of short stories and co-editor for Southerly
• David Brooks (inventor), inventor who patented an innovative insulator for telegraph lines in 1867 while working for the Central Pacific Railroad
• David Brooks (journalist) (born 1961), commentator for The New York Times and other publications
• David Brooks (murderer) (born 1955), teenaged accomplice of serial killer Dean Corll
• David Brooks (politician) (1756–1838), United States representative in the Fifth United States Congress
• David Brooks (rugby league), (born 1962) Australian rugby league footballer
• David Brooks (rugby union), (born 1924) British rugby union footballer
• David Allen Brooks (born 1947), American film and television actor who played archaeologist Max Eilerson on the science-fiction television series Crusade
• David "Bubba" Brooks, (born 1922) American jazz musician
• David "Mavado" Brooks (musician), (born 1981) Jamaican dancehall artist

This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same personal name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

From Wikiquote

David Brooks (born August 11, 1961) is a Canadian-American political and cultural commentator. Brooks served as an editorial writer and film reviewer for the Washington Times, a reporter and later op-ed editor for The Wall Street Journal, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard from its inception, a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Atlantic Monthly, and a commentator on NPR. He is now a columnist for The New York Times and commentator on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.

Sourced

• The political history of the 20th century is the history of social-engineering projects executed by well-intentioned people that began well and ended badly. There were big errors like communism, but also lesser ones, like a Vietnam War designed by the best and the brightest, urban renewal efforts that decimated neighborhoods, welfare policies that had the unintended effect of weakening families and development programs that left a string of white elephant projects across the world.

  These experiences drove me toward the crooked timber school of public philosophy: Michael Oakeshott, Isaiah Berlin, Edward Banfield, Reinhold Niebuhr, Friedrich Hayek, Clinton Rossiter and George Orwell. These writers — some left, some right — had a sense of epistemological modesty. They knew how little we can know. They understood that we are strangers to ourselves and society is an immeasurably complex organism. They tended to be skeptical of technocratic, rationalist planning and suspicious of schemes to reorganize society from the top down.

  • Brooks, David, "The Big Test", New York Times, February 23, 2009. URL accessed on February 24, 2009.

• Our moral and economic system is based on individual responsibility. It’s based on the idea that people have to live with the consequences of their decisions. This makes them more careful deciders. This means that society tends toward justice — people get what they deserve as much as possible.
  • Brooks, David, "Money for Idiots", New York Times, February 19, 2009. URL accessed on February 24, 2009.

• The nation’s economy is not just the sum of its individuals. It is an interwoven context that we all share. To stabilize that communal landscape, sometimes you have to shower money upon those who have been foolish or self-indulgent. The greedy idiots may be greedy idiots, but they are our countrymen. And at some level, we’re all in this together. If their lives don’t stabilize, then our lives don’t stabilize.
  • Brooks, David, "Money for Idiots", New York Times, February 19, 2009. URL accessed on February 24, 2009.

Unsourced

• Friends are a group of people who share a mutual inability to take each other seriously.
  • New York Times Op-Ed column

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

David Brooks

• David Brooks' Op-Ed columns at The New York Times