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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.

George Packer

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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Answers
Compromised
Values
Adapted
Away
Ideology
Different
Answer
Something
Asked
Circumstances
Question
Principles

More quotes by George Packer

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Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
George Packer
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I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
George Packer
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There's the basket of deplorables, who are bigots of various stripes, misogynists, anti-Muslim, racists, homophobes.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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Politics should seize the imagination.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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I don't think of Hillary Clinton as a bad choice. She's an uninspiring choice. She is a deeply imperfect choice, largely for reasons of her own tendency to get into a defensive crouch and create greater problems for herself and the rest of us by refusing to have a transparent reckoning.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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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.
George Packer
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We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
George Packer
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When Donald Trump yells at his supporters to throw somebody out of the hall - and usually that somebody is brown or black or often is - that means he's galvanizing a kind of mob spirit, which is also a racial mob spirit.
George Packer
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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 .
George Packer