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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
Wish
Disappointment
Fear
Leaves
Matter
Generally
Heart
Tongue
Stronger
Battle
Prove
Taste
Proves

More quotes by George Packer

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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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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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Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
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When Donald Trump says make America great again, we know whose America that is.
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I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
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There's the basket of deplorables, who are bigots of various stripes, misogynists, anti-Muslim, racists, homophobes.
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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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Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
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Twitter is crack for media addicts.
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Gingrich was a far more volatile and aggressive individual than Boehner, but the institutional norms of self-restraint, and perhaps even self-interest, have broken down under the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party.
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It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
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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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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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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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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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We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
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This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.
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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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Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.
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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.
George Packer