Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by George Packer

Image
I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
George Packer
Image
When Donald Trump says make America great again, we know whose America that is.
George Packer
Image
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
Image
Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.
George Packer
Image
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
Image
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
Image
We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
George Packer
Image
It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
George Packer
Image
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
George Packer
Image
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
Image
American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.
George Packer
Image
There's a great book about that, The Breaking Point by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.
George Packer
Image
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.
George Packer
Image
There's the basket of deplorables, who are bigots of various stripes, misogynists, anti-Muslim, racists, homophobes.
George Packer
Image
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
George Packer
Image
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.
George Packer
Image
We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
George Packer
Image
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
Image
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?
George Packer
Image
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.
George Packer