David Brooks · 288 pages
Rating: (3.6K votes)
“Self-actualization is what educated existence is all about. For members of the educated class, life is one long graduate school. When they die, God meets them at the gates of heaven, totes up how many fields of self-expression they have mastered, and then hands them a divine diploma and lets them in.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“To get the most attention, the essay should be wrong. Logical essays are read and understood. But an illogical or wrong essay will prompt dozens of other writers to rise and respond, thus giving the author mounds of publicity.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“You can't really know God if you ignore his laws, especially the ones that regulate the most intimate spheres of life. You may be responsible and healthy, but you will also be shallow and inconsequential.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“They turn nature into an achievement course, a series of ordeals and obstacles they can conquer. They go into nature to behave unnaturally. In nature animals flee cold and seek warmth and comfort. But Bobo naturalists flee comfort and seek cold and deprivation.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“The first thing you see, covering yards and yards of one wall, is an object that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor, but is really the stove.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“a statement by Bertrand Russell ... embodies the tone of heroic denunciation that you can muster only if you have drunk deeply from the cup of your own oracular majesty”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“If the article mentions some celebrity-perhaps a recently dead politician-the author will want to mention some pointless detail from her last meeting with that person or the emotions she experienced when learning of the subject's death.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“If done correctly, these techniques can allow the Bobo pilgrim to have 6 unforgettable moments a morning, 2 rapturous experiences over lunch, 1.5 profound insights in the afternoon (on average), and .667 life-altering epiphanies after each sunset.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“Bobos are uncomfortable with universal moral laws that purport to regulate pleasure. Bobos prefer more prosaic self-controlled regimes. The things that are forbidden are unhealthy or unsafe. The things that are encouraged are enriching or calorie burning. In other words, we regulate our carnal desires with health codes instead of moral codes.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“If you live in a society like ours, in which people seldom object if they hear someone taking the Lord's name in vain but are outraged if they see a pregnant woman smoking, then you are living in a world that values the worldly more than the divine.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
“[The public intellectual] will also describe how she can work a pop culture reference into her essay, comparing the Supreme Court to the creature in the number-one box office movie of the moment. Editors like this sort of mass-media integration, first, because it gives them a way to illustrate the piece, and second because they are under the delusion that pop-culture references will propel a piece's readership into the five-digit area.”
― David Brooks, quote from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There
David Brooks
Born place: in Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Born date August 10, 1961
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“It was so damn hard to find love in this world, to locate someone who could make you feel that there was a reason you'd been put on this earth. A child, I imagined, was the purest form of that. A child was the love you didn't have to look for, didn't have to prove anything to, didn't have to worry about losing. Which is why, when it happened, it hurt so badly.”
― Jodi Picoult, quote from Change of Heart
“Logan folded his arms. His voice was granite."My word stands."
"Can you love an idea more than you love a man and not become a monster? How many friends will you sacrifice on the altar of Justice, Logan?"
"If you force my hand, at least one."
They were standing on a precipice. Socially, Logan had always been Kylar's superior. Morally, Kylar had always felt inferior, too. But they'd never been placed in a direct hierarchical relation. Now Logan was giving an order. He would not be moved.
Kylar could only accept his order and accept all his orders henceforth, or reject it and them forever. There was a part of him that yearned to obey. He was convinced that killing Terah was the right thing, but Logan's moral compass was a more accurate instrument than Kylar's. What was it about submission that was so hard? Kylar wasn't being asked for blind servility. He was being asked to obey a man he knew and loved and respected, who in turn respected him.
'The wolfhound is pampered by the fire. The wolf is hunted in the cold.'
"Do you know how much I love you, Logan?" Kylar asked. Logan opened his mouth, but before he could say a word, Kylar said, "This much." And left.”
― Brent Weeks, quote from Beyond the Shadows
“Preventing your heart from forgiving someone you love is actually a hell of a lot harder than simply forgiving them.”
― Colleen Hoover, quote from It Ends with Us
“The Screelings are loose and the Keeper may win.
His assassins have come to rip off your skin.
Golden eyes will see you if you try to run.
The screelings will get you and laugh like it's fun.
Walk away slow or they'll tear you apart,
and laugh all day long as they rip out your heart.
Golden eyes will see you if you try to stand still.
The screelings will get you, for the Keeper they kill.
Hack 'em up, chop 'em up, cut 'em to bits,
or else they will get you while laughing in fits.
If the screelings don't get you the Keeper will try,
to reach out and touch you, your skin he will fry.
Your mind he will flail, your soul he will take.
You'll sleep with the dead, for life you'll forsake.
You'll die with the Keeper till the end of time.
He hates that you live, your life is the crime.
The screelings might get you, it says so in text.
If screelings don't get you the Keeper is next,
lest he who's born true can fight for life's bond.
And that one is marked; he's the pebble in the pond.”
― Terry Goodkind, quote from Stone of Tears
“Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end?
Captain Lonagan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, quote from Station Eleven
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