George Packer Quotes

24 quotes in 469 categories

• We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
• It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
• It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
• 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…
• With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
• Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and…
• Today, we have our own concentrations of economic power. Instead of Standard Oil, U.S. Steel, the Union Pacific Railroad, and J. P. Morgan and Company,…
• Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
• The invisibility of work and workers in the digital age is as consequential as the rise of the assembly line and, later, the service economy.
• Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
• Twitter is crack for media addicts,
• 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…
• 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…
• Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War.…
• 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…
• Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected.
• To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world - and it came along when the…
• 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 -…
• 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…
• 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,…

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