George Packer Quotes

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

At the heart of the matter is a battle between wish and fear. Fear generally proves stronger than a wish, but it leaves a taste of disappointment on the tongue.

I think that bias is not a fixed thing. It's not as though some people are biased and others are not. It ebbs and flows. It can be manipulated. It changes according to a person's circumstances.

There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.

I think it's important for Americans to try to understand each other a little better.

This is why mustard gas is such a danger or any weapon of mass destruction is such a dangerous thing because it - it's victims become everyone in the end.

This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.

When you go to Washington and get off at Union Station, as I sometimes do, and see the Capitol building, I get this hopeless feeling that comes over me.

Politics should seize the imagination.

I will find any excuse to go into somebody's study or ask them what they are reading. I can't think of too many other things that say what goes on in someone's head than the books they have.

It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.

I am reading "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers and "Redeployment" by Phil Klay . Both Powers and Klay are Iraq War vets. Klay's stories are remarkable.

I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.

You don't have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.

American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.

I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire. In the extremity of war, character is revealed.

If Hillary Clinton becomes president, how is she going to be able to get the country behind her when she seems like a political figure from another era?

What goes on in a person's head, what impels them to a political choice, it's a pretty complicated question.

There's the basket of deplorables, who are bigots of various stripes, misogynists, anti-Muslim, racists, homophobes.

I don't know how we continue to do politics in a democracy if we simply can't listen to one another, if we simply close the door and say you are beyond redemption.

When Donald Trump says make America great again, we know whose America that is.

When Donald Trump in one speech said I love the poorly educated - which was a remarkable thing to say - he was saying those are my people.

Under Bill Clinton we had a roaring economy that looked really good.

Globalization looked like it was going to answer all the economic questions of class. Turned out not to be the case.

I really do put it on Bill Clinton's presidency as the time when the Democrats became the party of the college degree as the key to success in life.

Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.

We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.

We have all the information in the universe at our fingertips, while our most basic problems go unsolved year after year...All around, we see dazzling technological change, but no progress.

Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.

We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.

Twitter is crack for media addicts.

The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.

It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.

With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.

Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.

Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

Like an odorless gas, [inequality] pervades every corner of the United States and saps the strength of the country's democracy. But it seems impossible to find the source and shut it off.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.

Discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent.

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care.

Inspiration is an underexamined part of political life and presidential leadership.

It's essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.

The Olympics are never just about sports.

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.