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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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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Scandal
Politicians
Politician
Deserve
Destiny
Usually
Sense
Scandals
Character
Inevitability

More quotes by 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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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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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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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 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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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
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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
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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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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
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American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.
George Packer
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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
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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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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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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 do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
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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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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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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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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Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
George Packer