Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

" In a meritocracy, actors who act well get good roles. They don't get to be journalists, too - a job that, in a meritocracy, should go to those who do journalism well. "

Related Quotes:

" 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

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up. "

" 'Charlie Hebdo' had been nondenominational in its satire, sticking its finger into the sensitivities of Jews and Christians, too - but only Muslims responded with threats and acts of terrorism. "

" 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. "

" 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 the pressure of an increasingly abnormal Republican Party. "

" 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. "

" I think the mix of narrative and analysis that the 'New Yorker' requires is a perfect expression of what my parents each gave me. "

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

George Packer

President

Man

" The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes. "

" I am not a pure fiction writer, nor am I an academic writer. Somehow I ended up in this blended area of literary journalism. "

" I need to protect myself from my own addictive impulse. "

" The next great technology revolution might be around the corner, but it won't automatically improve most people's lives. That will depend on politics, which is indeed ugly but also inescapable. "

" Often, foreign policy - which, by definition, is largely out of American control - is simply a matter of not doing the wrong thing, the unwise thing. "

" Obama is the splendid fruit of a meritocracy. "

" 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. "

" Last year, in the year 2008, it just became normal to watch great American institutions crumble, almost dissolve like sand. "

" The hollowing out of the heartland was good for Walmart's bottom line: its slogan might have been an amoral maxim attributed to Lenin - 'The worse, the better.' "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" If you've ever left a bag of clothes outside the Salvation Army or given to a local church drive, chances are that you've dressed an African. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Jay-Z is a hero, Sam Walton is a hero - these are not exactly communitarian champions. These are - in some cases, literally; in others, just figuratively - gangster heroes. That's who is worshipped: people who get away with it. "

" A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth. "

" Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them. "

" Before Google, and long before Facebook, Bezos had realized that the greatest value of an online company lay in the consumer data it collected. "

" The Princeton economist Alan Krueger has demonstrated that societies with higher levels of income inequality are societies with lower levels of social mobility. "