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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.

George Packer

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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Prove
Taste
Proves
Wish
Disappointment
Fear
Leaves
Matter
Generally
Heart
Tongue
Stronger
Battle

More quotes by George Packer

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It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
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Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
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We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
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Politics should seize the imagination.
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Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.
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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.
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Hillary Clinton said we need to bring back vocational education in high school. We need to support community colleges. We need to make sure that people who are not going to finish college have a job waiting for them and the skills to do the job. These are all - have become fairly standard Democratic policy positions.
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I've read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves's memoir Goodbye to All That, and a civilian memoir Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain .
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We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
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People in Congress are willing to shut down the entire government or to make it impossible for a Supreme Court nominee to get a hearing or for routine appointments in the executive branch to go unfilled for years because of a hold placed by a senator.
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Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.
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Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.
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Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
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When I interviewed Paul Bremer in his office he had almost no books on his shelves. He had a couple of management books, like Leadership by Rudolph Giuliani . I didn't take it as an encouraging sign.
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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.
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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?
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With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
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One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was Bureaucracy Does Its Thing by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.
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You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.
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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.
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