George Packer Quotes
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Ambition, of course, is the politician's currency.
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That's why I'm not on Twitter and don't have an iPhone. It's not because I'm superior to it: it's because I would be a slave to it, and I don't want that to happen.
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The difference between a reporter, a newspaper columnist, a paid speaker, a television personality, a radio talk show host, a blogger, a movie producer, a publicist, and a political strategist, is growing less - and not more - distinct.
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Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.
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I am never going to be able to rest easy in having established a posthumous connection to my father. I'll always be groping for what I can't have.
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Al Qaeda asks its recruits to establish their bona fides as a condition of membership, even requiring answers to a long questionnaire. But ISIS has democratized and globalized jihad by lowering the entry bar to an eve-of-destruction YouTube pledge of allegiance to the caliphate - and even that could probably be waived.
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Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
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The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable.
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I worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa - that came out in 1988 - called 'The Village of Waiting.'
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Obama is the splendid fruit of a meritocracy.
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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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A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents.
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America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.
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The Olympics are never just about sports.
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The Senate was an odd compromise between the founders and the early leaders of the republic who wanted a single house which was based on popular sovereignty representing the people and those founders who wanted two houses, the upper house, the Senate, being the more aristocratic.
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The war in Afghanistan is not of a peace with the rest of Obama's worldview. It's a holdover from the era that his election was supposed to bring to a close.
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If you've ever left a bag of clothes outside the Salvation Army or given to a local church drive, chances are that you've dressed an African.
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Together, Apple and Walmart represent the intense separation of American life into blue and red, rich and poor, overpriced and undersold, hyperconnected and left behind.
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Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
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Oprah is just this goddess presiding over so much of American life, and her story is really interesting - the way she made herself, and the ruthlessness it took, and also the fantasizing that it took.
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I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.
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Often, foreign policy - which, by definition, is largely out of American control - is simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing, the unwise thing.
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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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It seems in America you are stuck with the position you adopted, even when events change, in order to claim absolute consistency. That can't be good.