‘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
The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up. – George Packer
I spend much too much time on the Web with e-mail and surfing and reading my key sites, and a whole day can go by, and you wonder, ‘What did I do today?’ – George Packer
I have my sympathies and also my critical views, and they aren’t much of a secret, but my first job is to see and hear and think about what I’ve seen and heard. – 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
American wars in Muslim countries created some extremists and inflamed many more while producing a security vacuum that allowed them to wreak mayhem. – George Packer
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. – George Packer
Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand. – George Packer
In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. – George Packer
Oprah is just this goddess presiding over so much of American life, and her story is really interesting – the way she made herself, and the ruthlessness it took, and also the fantasizing that it took. – George Packer
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. – 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
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
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
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. – 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
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
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. – 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
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
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
I’ve read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves’s memoir ‘Goodbye to All That,’ and a civilian memoir, ‘Testament of Youth,’ by Vera Brittain. – George Packer
Everyone finds justification for his or her views in logic and analysis, but a personal philosophy often emerges from some archaic part of the mind, an early idea of how the world should be. – 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
We have at least learned that the offspring of presidents don’t necessarily make good politicians themselves. – George Packer