Top 70 George Packer Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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

I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the ‘New Yorker’ requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me.

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.

Republicans today have given the country conservatism in the spirit of Sarah Palin, whose ignorance about the world, contempt for expertise, and raw appeals to white identity politics presaged Trump’s incendiary campaign.

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.

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.

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.’

Millions don’t rally to the banner of Uncertainty.

The base of the party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of globalization, low-wage immigrant labor, and free trade. Trump sensed the rage that flared from this pain and made it the fuel of his campaign.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

On foreign policy, Obama has talked softly and carried a big stick.

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.

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

Mark Zuckerberg has started an advocacy group for immigration reform.

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.

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.

The similarities are limited but real. They amount to a shared disgust with politics as usual in America. The Tea Party focuses on the federal government; Occupy Wall Street focuses on corporate America and its influence over the government.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

Discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

In a meritocracy, actors who act well get good roles. They don’t get to be journalists, too – a job that, in a meritocracy, should go to those who do journalism well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.

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.