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" That's why I'm not on Twitter and don't have an iPhone. It's not because I'm superior to it: it's because I would be a slave to it, and I don't want that to happen. "

George Packer

Would

Why

Happen

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" America's vast population of working poor can only get so poor before even Walmart is out of reach. "

" Walmart's period of explosive growth coincided with decades of wage stagnation and deindustrialization. By applying relentless downward pressure on prices and wages, the company came to dominate both consumer spending and employment in small towns and rural areas across the middle of the country. "

" Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore faith in government. "

" Trump has seized the Republican nomination by finding scapegoats for the economic hardships and disintegrating lives of working-class whites while giving these voters a reassuring but false promise of their restoration to the center of American life. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Liberal democracies like ours seem, for the most part, to have learned how to avoid meticulously planned mass-casualty plots with the complexity and scale of 9/11. But they don't know how to keep their citizens safe at night clubs and concerts, in supermarkets, on beachfront promenades, from truck drivers. "

George Packer

Know

Liberal

" Ambition, of course, is the politician's currency. "

" I worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa - that came out in 1988 - called 'The Village of Waiting.' "

" The constellation of opinion called the blogosphere consists, like the stars themselves, partly of gases. This is what makes blogs addictive - that is, both pleasurable and destructive: They're so easy to consume and so endlessly available. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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?' "

" If the presidential nominating process were an international sports competition, one would assume that top officials of both parties were taking envelopes of cash from town chairs in Durham and precinct captains in Waterloo. "

" 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. "

" 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

Alone

Attitude

" 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. "

" American wars in Muslim countries created some extremists and inflamed many more while producing a security vacuum that allowed them to wreak mayhem. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" Over the years, America had become more like Wal-Mart. It had gotten cheap. Prices were lower, and wages were lower. There were fewer union factory jobs and more part-time jobs as greeters. "

George Packer

Over

" On foreign policy, Obama has talked softly and carried a big stick. "

" 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. "

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

" By the fall of 2007, my last remaining Iraqi friend in Baghdad had left. Once he was gone, my connection to the country and the war began to thin, even as the terror diminished. I missed the improvement that came with the surge, and so, in my nervous system, I never quite registered it. "

" In its lowest, most common form, inspiration is simple charisma that becomes magnified by the media, as with Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton. "

" 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. "

George Packer

Job

Good

" 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

Leadership

Office

" 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. "