George Packer Quotes

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George Packer

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 13, 1960

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

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

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

'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.

George Packer