George Packer

Politics should seize the imagination.

— George Packer

Partly what I'm writing about is the way taboos get toppled.

— George Packer

The Olympics are never just about sports.

— George Packer

Under Bill Clinton we had a roaring economy that looked really good.

— George Packer

We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.

— George Packer

What can one man do even if he is the president?

— George Packer

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

— George Packer

How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.

— George Packer

Politics should be, you know, as exciting as literature, as exciting film.

— George Packer

I do think Donald Trump would be a catastrophic turn in American history.

— George Packer

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

— George Packer

You don't have to be foreign policy expert to succeed as president, but you have to have ice water for blood.

— George Packer

There's a great book about that, "The Breaking Point" by Stephen Koch . It won't improve your opinion of [Ernest] Hemingway.

— George Packer

Globalization looked like it was going to answer all the economic questions of class. Turned out not to be the case.

— George Packer

This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to…

— George Packer

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

— George Packer

So many writers grew up in tortured isolation, in revolt against their families. I and my sister were in a house where…

— George Packer

Hillary Clinton would say I'm going to fund a program that will find the local, you know, industrial or manufacturing jobs that…

— George Packer

The base of the party, the middle-aged white working class, has suffered at least as much as any demographic group because of…

— 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…

— George Packer

“[O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on…

— George Packer

I would caution anyone who thinks the solution is to get out to realize that Iraq will be our problem, whether we're…

— George Packer

It's kind of funny to read the work of ex-Marines and soldiers because what they said to me as a reporter was…

— George Packer

This is why mustard gas is such a danger or any weapon of mass destruction is such a dangerous thing because it…

— George Packer

We've just been sort of spinning our wheels for such a long time, for decades really, with each new president being considered…

— George Packer

“shakedowns and restrictive new laws. Ivorians from the north, who tend to share family names and the Muslim faith with immigrants from…

— George Packer

Hillary Clinton's such a classic Democratic political figure and believes so much in institutions and in gradualism in the old way of…

— George Packer

“This malignant persistence since September 11th is the biggest surprise of all. In previous decades, sneak attacks, stock-market crashes, and other great…

— George Packer

Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In…

— 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…

— George Packer

Hillary Clinton said we need to bring back vocational education in high school. We need to support community colleges. We need to…

— George Packer

The information age has made Thiel rich, but it has also been a disappointment to him. It hasn't created enough jobs, and…

— George Packer

“end of the class he stood in the doorway to block the Frenchman’s exit. “You’re going around the world showing people pictures…

— George Packer

The biggest issue for me is whether large numbers of Americans can begin to think that government can actually help make the…

— George Packer

“[T]he enduring problem for liberals, as for everyone else, is not whether history will judge them wise or foolish regarding the war…

— George Packer

The ranks of educated professional swelled as more Americans went to college and more Americans sort of adopted a more cosmopolitan lifestyle…

— George Packer

“Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south…

— George Packer

“The attacks of 9/11 were the biggest surprise in American history, and for the past ten years we haven't stopped being surprised.…

— George Packer

Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of…

— George Packer

“If you were born in 1950 and were in the top ten percent, everything got better for twenty years automatically. Then, after…

— George Packer