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" If giving money to a politician prejudiced my ability to think and write honestly, I wouldn't do it. Fortunately, it doesn't. "
George Packer
Write
Think
Giving
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" 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
Secret
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First
" I am never going to be able to rest easy in having established a posthumous connection to my father. I'll always be groping for what I can't have. "
George Packer
Rest
Easy
Connection
" 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 propaganda. "
George Packer
Focused
Games
Propaganda
" America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach. "
George Packer
Only
Working
Out
" 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
He
Leadership
Office
" Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand. "
George Packer
Great
American
Watch
" 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
American
Year
Politics
" The war in Afghanistan is not of a peace with the rest of Obama's worldview. It's a holdover from the era that his election was supposed to bring to a close. "
George Packer
Election
War
Bring
" 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
Sports
Country
Reputation
" 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.' "
George Packer
Us
Alone
Attitude
" Mark Zuckerberg has started an advocacy group for immigration reform. "
George Packer
Started
Group
Advocacy
" 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. "
George Packer
People
Look
Powerful
" I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse. "
George Packer
My Own
Myself
Need
" 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
Value
Google
Long
" 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
America
You
Good
" So many writers grew up in tortured isolation, in revolt against their families. I and my sister were in a house where writing was considered the worthiest thing you could try to do. "
George Packer
You
House
Isolation
" The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility. "
George Packer
Inequality
Higher
Mobility
" It's - the working class of San Francisco and the Bay Area is being pushed out of its old neighborhoods because of the skyrocketing cost of housing, and there's no real working class left because these are jobs for engineers and managers and designers - very smart people. "
George Packer
Class
People
Real
" 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, we have Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft. "
George Packer
Railroad
Today
Apple
" 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
Face
Past
Hero
" On foreign policy, Obama has talked softly and carried a big stick. "
George Packer
Big
Foreign Policy
Policy
" I thought Obama was in a position to do some things. I thought 2008 was a turning point in history, with him and the Wall Street crash happening at the same time, but you just learn that those entrenched powers were really entrenched; those decayed institutions were really decayed. "
George Packer
You
Time
Thought
" 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
America
Tea
Real
" Millions don't rally to the banner of Uncertainty. "
George Packer
Millions
Uncertainty
Banner
" In the extremity of war, character is revealed. "
George Packer
Extremity
Character
Revealed
" Ambition, of course, is the politician's currency. "
George Packer
Course
Politician
Currency
" I don't know if it's a male thing, but I've always been interested in how people respond to the stresses and dangers of war, how they react under fire. "
George Packer
React
Always
Know
" Every movement, to stay alive - a very difficult thing to do historically - has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recruiting new members, strategizing, negotiating with those in power, keeping itself going. "
George Packer
Find
Alive
Work
" 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. "
George Packer
Line
Age
Work
" 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
War
Poetry
Goodbye