George Packer Quotes

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George Packer

Profession : Novelist

Birth : August 13, 1960

'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.

George Packer

The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

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

George Packer

I don't think they need to be nice to reporters, but the White House seems to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim.

George Packer

It seems in America you are stuck with the position you adopted, even when events change, in order to claim absolute consistency. That can't be good.

George Packer

No-one can say when the unwinding began, when the coil that held America together in its secure and sometime shifting grip first gave way.

George Packer

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?

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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

George Packer

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.

George Packer

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.

George Packer

Liberal democracies like ours seem, for the most part, to have learned how to avoid meticulously planned mass-casualty plots with the complexity and scale of 9/11. But they don't know how to keep their citizens safe at night clubs and concerts, in supermarkets, on beachfront promenades, from truck drivers.

George Packer

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

George Packer

If the presidential nominating process were an international sports competition, one would assume that top officials of both parties were taking envelopes of cash from town chairs in Durham and precinct captains in Waterloo.

George Packer