George Packer
26 quotes
Biography
George Packer is an American journalist, novelist, and playwright. He is best known for his writings about U.S. foreign policy for The New Yorker and The Atlantic and for his book The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq.
"Barack Obama was a writer before he became a politician, and he saw his Presidency as a struggle over narrative."
"Barack Obama was always better at explaining the meaning of democracy than at fighting its opponents."
"After Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the burden of proof is on anyone who would make the case for military action as a force for good."
"It’s hard to build a narrative around actions not taken, disasters possibly averted, hard realities accommodated. The story of what didn’t happen isn’t an easy one to tell."
"More than any modern President, Barack Obama had a keen sense of the limits of American power—and of his own."
"At the heart of Obama’s narrative was a belief that progress, in the larger scheme of things, was inevitable, and this belief underscored his position on every issue from marriage equality to climate change. His idea of progress was neither the rigid millennial faith of Woodrow Wilson nor Bush’s shallow God-blessed optimism. It was human-scale and incremental."
"Progressives find it hard to imagine that there are others who in good faith don’t want the better world they’re offering and will fiercely resist it."
"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."
"[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood."
"The Iraq war was always a long shot. But it was made immeasurably longer by its principal architects in Washington, including Douglas Feith, who ignored expert advice, reserved most of their effort for fighting each other in ideological battles, and regarded the Iraqi people as an afterthought."
"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."
"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."
"Inspiration is an underexamined part of political life and presidential leadership."
"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."
"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."
"Discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent."
"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."
"What I found in Silicon Valley is an industry that's sort of been kept a very far remove from Washington and had an attitude of 'Just let us do our thing and make the miracles that people love around the world and leave us alone.'"
"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."
"The Olympics are never just about sports."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."