Quote

You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.

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
Blood
Water
President
Expert
Ice
Experts
Foreign
Succeed
Policy

More quotes by 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
We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
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
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 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
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
Image
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
Image
This is why mustard gas is such a danger or any weapon of mass destruction is such a dangerous thing because it - it's victims become everyone in the end.
George Packer
Image
I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
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
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
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
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
Inequality saps the will to conceive of ambitious solutions to large collective problems, because those problems no longer seem very collective.
George Packer
Image
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
Image
There's the basket of deplorables, who are bigots of various stripes, misogynists, anti-Muslim, racists, homophobes.
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
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
Image
Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.
George Packer
Image
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
George Packer