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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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George Packer
Age: 64
Born: 1960
Born: August 13
Journalist
Novelist
Writer
Santa Clara
California
Like
Leadership
Office
Rudolph
Couple
Interviewed
Books
Shelves
Almost
Encouraging
Didn
Paul
Book
Sign
Take
Management

More quotes by 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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Politics should seize the imagination.
George Packer
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Twitter is crack for media addicts.
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 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 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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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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We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.
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When Donald Trump says make America great again, we know whose America that is.
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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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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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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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'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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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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I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.
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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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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It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
George Packer