Top 70 George Packer Quotes

A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents.

A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.

It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.

Certain murderous ideas are in the air worldwide, and they are finding individuals in scattered places in different ways, and every attack spreads them further, plants an idea in a new head.

‘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.

It’s a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it’s true.

I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse.

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.

How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.

It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn’t seem like fun to me.

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.’

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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.

American wars in Muslim countries created some extremists and inflamed many more while producing a security vacuum that allowed them to wreak mayhem.

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.

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?

Everything seems set up for success in digital journalism – money, eyeballs, software, brands.

The best example of Obama‘s success in foreign policy is Iran.

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.

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.

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.

I spend much too much time on the Web with e-mail and surfing and reading my key sites, and a whole day can go by, and you wonder, ‘What did I do today?’

Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.

Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore faith in government.

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.

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.

Obama is the splendid fruit of a meritocracy.

Mark Zuckerberg has started an advocacy group for immigration reform.

Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.

Inspiration is an underexamined part of political life and presidential leadership.

Jay-Z has kind of shown that you can get to the very top without waiting, without following rules. In fact, it’s better if you don’t. People will admire you more if you break the rules.

In the extremity of war, character is revealed.

Foreign policy exactly suits Obama’s strong points as a leader, which turn out not to be giving the masses a clear sense of direction and hope, but instead exercising good judgment on a case-by-case basis while thinking many steps ahead of the present moment.

A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.

I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism.

Every movement, to stay alive – a very difficult thing to do historically – has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recruiting new members, strategizing, negotiating with those in power, keeping itself going.

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.

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.

If giving money to a politician prejudiced my ability to think and write honestly, I wouldn’t do it. Fortunately, it doesn’t.

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 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.

‘Charlie Hebdo’ had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too – but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism.

It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech startups are solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.

Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism’s dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.

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.

WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a cell of activists that is releasing information designed to embarrass people in power.

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 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.

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.

Partly what I’m writing about is the way taboos get toppled.

Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs and more part-time jobs as greeters.

In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton.

America’s vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach.

My readers know my views on politics and politicians because I make no secret of them in my comments for ‘The New Yorker‘ and elsewhere.

Americans almost never elect presidents on the basis of foreign policy.

Ambition, of course, is the politician’s currency.

Amazon’s identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.

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.

Afghanistan can’t police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents.

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.

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.

What can one man do even if he is the president?

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.

The idea of solving as huge and long-term a problem as inequality – which, for my money, is the biggest single problem we have here at home – just never gets serious concern from both sides.

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.

Walmart’s period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to dominate both consumer spending and employment in small towns and rural areas across the middle of the country.

Pay attention to other people’s nightmares because they might be contagious.