Top 178 Quotes & Sayings by George Packer
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American novelist George Packer.
Last updated on December 23, 2024.
I actually think that self-interest is overrated as an all-purpose guide to political motive. It leaves out something at least as powerful and immovable - individual psychology.
Part of the mystique of blogs is their protean quality: They work both sides of the divide between politics and media, further blurring the already fuzzy distinctions between reporter, pundit, political operative, activist, and citizen.
Discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent.
Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.
By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it.
Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be.
It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility.
As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.
It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn't seem like fun to me.
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
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.
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
Mark Zuckerberg has started an advocacy group for immigration reform.
Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care.
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.
I've been interested in American politics since I was eight. That was in 1968. It was an interesting year. I was a huge Eugene McCarthy supporter, so I guess he was the first senator I really knew about and cared about.
Too many talented and supremely calculating politicians, including Nixon and Clinton, have destroyed their careers, or come close, by acting in ways that were obviously against their own interests.
What can one man do even if he is the president?
Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life.
Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.
Jay-Z is a hero, Sam Walton is a hero - these are not exactly communitarian champions. These are - in some cases, literally; in others, just figuratively - gangster heroes. That's who is worshipped: people who get away with it.
The phrase 'change the world' is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of 'early-stage investing' and 'beta tests.'
The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.
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.
Climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans' care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world's greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.
To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world - and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales.
In the extremity of war, character is revealed.
What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say.
I thought Obama was in a position to do some things. I thought 2008 was a turning point in history, with him and the Wall Street crash happening at the same time, but you just learn that those entrenched powers were really entrenched; those decayed institutions were really decayed.
A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents.
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.
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.
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
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.
The information age has made Thiel rich, but it has also been a disappointment to him. It hasn't created enough jobs, and it hasn't produced revolutionary improvements in manufacturing and productivity. The creation of virtual worlds turns out to be no substitute for advances in the physical world.
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.
Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism - money, eyeballs, software, brands.
How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.
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.
It's - the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers - very smart people.
Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas.
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.
Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments - who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.
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.'
While starving refugees in Homs were providing target practice for government snipers, Bashar al-Assad's strongest international backer was in Sochi, at the Iceberg Skating Palace, visibly moved, smiling with deep satisfaction, as the Russians beautifully glided and leaped their way to the gold medal in the team event.
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.
It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
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.
'The Assassins' Gate' is a very tightly controlled story of the ideas that led to the war and the consequences of those ideas in Iraq, and there is no doubt about where it is going and what kind of groundwork is being laid.
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.
No one pretends anymore that the Olympics are just about sports. It's routine to talk about what effect holding the Games in this or that capital will have on the host country's international reputation, how a nation's prestige can be raised by its medal count.
Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.
All over Africa, people are wearing what Americans once wore and no longer want. Visit the continent, and you'll find faded remnants of secondhand clothing in the strangest of places.
Millions don't rally to the banner of Uncertainty.
I have my sympathies and also my critical views, and they aren't much of a secret, but my first job is to see and hear and think about what I've seen and heard.
What I found in Silicon Valley is an industry that's sort of been kept a very far remove from Washington and had an attitude of 'Just let us do our thing and make the miracles that people love around the world and leave us alone.'
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.'
America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.
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