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

George Packer

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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Soon
Society

More quotes by George Packer

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Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
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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When Donald Trump says make America great again, we know whose America that is.
George Packer
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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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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 think in the '50s, the percentage of Americans employed by the private sector who were in unions was above 30 percent. And now it's in the single digits, so it plummeted. And with the plummeting of unions came the weakening of an organized working-class voice in politics.
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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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
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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.
George Packer
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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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American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.
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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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.
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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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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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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Much of the international unease with the Sochi Games has focused on the threat of terrorism, Putin's domestic repressiveness, and the Russian campaign of anti-gay propaganda.
George Packer
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I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're there or not, for years to come. It will not be Vietnam it will not let us go home and lick our wounds.
George Packer
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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
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There's a great book about that, The Breaking Point by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.
George Packer