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American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

George Packer

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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Women
Great
Men
Insular
Profoundly
Produce
Politics
American

More quotes by 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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We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
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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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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Twitter is crack for media addicts.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
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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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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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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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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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 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