Quotes from Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There

“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

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Popular quotes

“He straightened. "Are you ready?"
"Yes."
He nodded, his gaze traveling the length of her body, deliberately, slowly, as if to memorize her as she stood.
"Then may I have a kiss?" he asked, unmoving. "For luck?"
She felt her heart pick up. She felt her face grow hot.
"You see? I'm asking, not demanding." He lifted his hands to her, palms up.
"Even the most beastly of us can learn."
Rue dropped her gaze to the ground, discomfited. "I don't think you're beastly."
"Thank goodness. I was about to point out that that fellow down there has far worse breath than I do."
She laughed softly, shaking her head, but by then his fingers were curling around hers.
"Is that a yes, mouse?"
She inhaled: heat, and animal. Him.
Rue lifted her chin. "Yes."
Everything happened so gently at first, so languidly, as his hands drew hers behind his back so that she had to step toward him, so that their fronts had to touch. As soon as they did his fingers released; he smoothed his palms up her back, one hand at her waist and the other rising to cradle her head. She felt her hair bunch and slide with the passage of his fingers. She felt the cool air on her skin, and the welcome warmth of his chest and stomach and hips. His eyes roamed her face with that half-lidded intensity; she brought up a hand to the slope of his shoulder, resting it there. They stood there together in the open dark, soft and hard, while her stomach tied in knots and her hair stirred with the breeze.
She wet her lips, nervous. "Are...are you going to do it?"
"I am." His head tilted to hers. She felt his lips against her cheek, light, thistledown, barely there. "I just..."
"What?" she whispered, staring out into the shadows.
"I just like looking at you."
So when he kissed her she was smiling a little, her lips curved under his. Kit loved that curve.

-Kit & Rue”
― Shana Abe, quote from The Smoke Thief

“I do not like these painted faces that look all alike; and I think women are foolish to dull their expression and obscure their personality with powder, rouge, and lipstick.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, quote from Collected Short Stories: Volume 1

“أن تعيش يعني أحياناً أن تنتظر”
― Sándor Márai, quote from Casanova in Bolzano

“Always wrong but never in doubt.”
― quote from The Faithful Spy

“In truth, I don't want to be there. I don't want to see the light go out of my brother's eyes.”
― Lurlene McDaniel, quote from Breathless

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