George Packer Quotes

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.

Inequality hardens society into a class system. Inequality divides us from one another... Inequality undermines democracy.

The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.

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.

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.

The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the 'Mission Accomplished' declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam's capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.

I think that bias is not a fixed thing. It's not as though some people are biased and others are not. It ebbs and flows. It can be manipulated. It changes according to a person's circumstances.

Hillary Clinton said we need to bring back vocational education in high school. We need to support community colleges. We need to make sure that people who are not going to finish college have a job waiting for them and the skills to do the job. These are all - have become fairly standard Democratic policy positions.

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. In the extremity of war, character is revealed.

There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.

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 .

You don`t have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.

American politics can produce great men and women, but it is profoundly insular.

A genuine approach to budget cutting - knowing exactly what you're cutting and why, and with what real-life consequences - is beyond my competence, and probably beyond the competence of any politician in America.

When Donald Trump in one speech said I love the poorly educated - which was a remarkable thing to say - he was saying those are my people.

The way Donald Trump talks about the problems of black Americans as a kind of separate group who are not part of his audience but he's kind of reaching over his audience or behind his audience to black Americans, saying what have you got to lose? As in you might as well join me because the Democrats haven't done anything for you. But joining me means joining this group that already supports me.

In a sense, whites who were always sort of the unthinking majority who didn't think of themselves necessarily as one among many interest groups but is simply the dominant group, now as whites become - are close to becoming a minority of Americans, are becoming a political interest group. And that's what Donald Trump is playing to. And it's a really dangerous, volatile game.

When Donald Trump says make America great again, we know whose America that is.

We all know who Donald Trump's talking to.

It used to be that the working class, broadly speaking - Americans who worked with their hands, who worked in factories, who were not in management - were an interest group, a political interest group. And their main spokespersons were the Democrats. Their platform was the Democratic Party. And that began to change after the 1960s. Not for black or other working class Americans, but for white working class.

I will find any excuse to go into somebody's study or ask them what they are reading. I can't think of too many other things that say what goes on in someone's head than the books they have.

Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead.

It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was only a fraction of what they were thinking and feeling and saying to one another.

What goes on in a person's head, what impels them to a political choice, it's a pretty complicated question.

There's the basket of deplorables, who are bigots of various stripes, misogynists, anti-Muslim, racists, homophobes.

I don't know how we continue to do politics in a democracy if we simply can't listen to one another, if we simply close the door and say you are beyond redemption.

Playing to resentment and using a lot of, you know, grand abstract phrases like make America great again is - it just doesn't have the answer. It's simply a way to whip up emotion and then leave people more bitter than you found them.

Hillary Clinton would say I'm going to fund a program that will find the local, you know, industrial or manufacturing jobs that are available and train you to do that job. And then you're going to get that job. And it's a much more of a nuts and bolts sort of policy vision.

We've just been sort of spinning our wheels for such a long time, for decades really, with each new president being considered illegitimate by the other side. That's been the case ever since Bill Clinton. And it's a - you can't keep frittering away your political capital that way and expect there not to be some long-term rot that sets in.

With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.

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.

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.

Globalization looked like it was going to answer all the economic questions of class. Turned out not to be the case.

Under Bill Clinton we had a roaring economy that looked really good.

The ranks of educated professional swelled as more Americans went to college and more Americans sort of adopted a more cosmopolitan lifestyle and worldview. And as the Democrats were looking for an alternative to the unions who no longer seemed like a large enough base for the party, they found the educated who veered more toward a progressive cultural outlook, who may have had - may have been working in the financial sector, in entertainment, in media, in universities. That became really the rank and file of the Democratic Party over a long period of time.

We all have a dark side but we keep it in its place because it's destructive. And Donald Trump has said, no, no, bring it out because that's the energy we need in order to reverse all these horrible things that have been happening in America.

I think it's important for Americans to try to understand each other a little better.

This is why mustard gas is such a danger or any weapon of mass destruction is such a dangerous thing because it - it's victims become everyone in the end.

People in Congress are willing to shut down the entire government or to make it impossible for a Supreme Court nominee to get a hearing or for routine appointments in the executive branch to go unfilled for years because of a hold placed by a senator.

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?

Hillary Clinton's such a classic Democratic political figure and believes so much in institutions and in gradualism in the old way of reaching compromises with the opposition in the back rooms. That's what she did in Congress. It's what I imagine she'll try to do in the White House.

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.

I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.

Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.

Politics should seize the imagination.

When you go to Washington and get off at Union Station, as I sometimes do, and see the Capitol building, I get this hopeless feeling that comes over me.

This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.

We focus on that really repulsive minority of racists. But then there's a continuum that goes all the way to, you know, what used to be called the white backlash or to, you know, the feelings of some white people that they're losing out and that the jobs and power and sort of the culture is drifting away from them and toward people who don't look like them, who don't - who they don't know very well. And that's not necessarily - I don't equate that with the hardcore ideological hatred of self-identified racists.

When Donald Trump yells at his supporters to throw somebody out of the hall - and usually that somebody is brown or black or often is - that means he's galvanizing a kind of mob spirit, which is also a racial mob spirit.

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.