George Packer Quotes

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George Packer

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 13, 1960

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

For 20 years, my mother, my sister and I had seldom spoken of my father. If he happened to come up in conversation, pain and embarrassment entered the room and stayed until he disappeared back into the silence with which we all felt more at ease.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

White male privilege remains alive in America, but the phrase would seem odd, if not infuriating, to a sixty-year-old man working as a Walmart greeter in southern Ohio.

George Packer

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.'

George Packer

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

George Packer

Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand.

George Packer

The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

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

George Packer

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

George Packer

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.

George Packer