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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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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Class
Collective
Seems
Inequality
Problem
Ambitious
Solutions
Large
Saps
Seem
Sap
Problems
Conceive
Longer
Collectives

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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.
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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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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.
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Politics should seize the imagination.
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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.
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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.
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We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
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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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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.
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We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
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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.
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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'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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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.
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With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
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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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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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