George Packer Quotes
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Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators and, not least, journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials?
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Partly what I'm writing about is the way taboos get toppled.
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A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.
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In the extremity of war, character is revealed.
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Politics demands certain skills honed by experience, just as journalism does, just as acting does.
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How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.
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Liberal democracies like ours seem, for the most part, to have learned how to avoid meticulously planned mass-casualty plots with the complexity and scale of 9/11. But they don't know how to keep their citizens safe at night clubs and concerts, in supermarkets, on beachfront promenades, from truck drivers.
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The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart's bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin - 'The worse, the better.'
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I don't think they need to be nice to reporters, but the White House seems to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim.
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I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the 'New Yorker' requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me.
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No-one can say when the unwinding began, when the coil that held America together in its secure and sometime shifting grip first gave way.
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The best example of Obama's success in foreign policy is Iran.
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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.
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Afghanistan can't police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents.
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The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive - that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to consume and so endlessly available.
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The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes.
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I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse.
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It's essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.
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It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
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Pay attention to other people's nightmares because they might be contagious.