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" Obama is the splendid fruit of a meritocracy. "
George Packer
Splendid
Fruit
Obama
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" 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
Mother
Sister
Silence
" No-one can say when the unwinding began, when the coil that held America together in its secure and sometime shifting grip first gave way. "
George Packer
Together
Gave
First
" The best example of Obama's success in foreign policy is Iran. "
George Packer
Best
Success
Policy
" 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. "
George Packer
People
Away
Hero
" 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. "
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React
Always
Know
" America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach. "
George Packer
Only
Working
Out
" Jay-Z has kind of shown that you can get to the very top without waiting, without following rules. In fact, it's better if you don't. People will admire you more if you break the rules. "
George Packer
Rules
Top
You
" A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. "
George Packer
Living
Set
Religion
" A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another. "
George Packer
Almost
World
Curious
" 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
" 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
World
Logic
Early
" 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
" Lawyers, judges, doctors, shrinks, accountants, investigators and, not least, journalists could not do the most basic tasks without a veil of secrecy. Why shouldn't the same be true of those professionals who happen to be government officials? "
George Packer
Be True
Why
True
" Politics demands certain skills honed by experience, just as journalism does, just as acting does. "
George Packer
Journalism
Acting
Experience
" 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
Know
Politics
Secret
" Too many talented and supremely calculating politicians, including Nixon and Clinton, have destroyed their careers, or come close, by acting in ways that were obviously against their own interests. "
George Packer
Acting
Politicians
Against
" 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
Inspiration
Media
Charisma
" Al Qaeda asks its recruits to establish their bona fides as a condition of membership, even requiring answers to a long questionnaire. But ISIS has democratized and globalized jihad by lowering the entry bar to an eve-of-destruction YouTube pledge of allegiance to the caliphate - and even that could probably be waived. "
George Packer
Membership
Bar
Answers
" 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
" 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
" 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
" It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn't seem like fun to me. "
George Packer
Fun
Wise
Political
" We have at least learned that the offspring of presidents don't necessarily make good politicians themselves. "
George Packer
Learned
Politicians
Themselves
" 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
" In the extremity of war, character is revealed. "
George Packer
Extremity
Character
Revealed
" Together, Apple and Walmart represent the intense separation of American life into blue and red, rich and poor, overpriced and undersold, hyperconnected and left behind. "
George Packer
Rich
Together
Blue
" 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
Nor
Journalism
I Am
" 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
" 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
" With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy. "
George Packer
Human
Economy
Internet