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" 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. "

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" 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.' "

George Packer

Book

Waiting

Writing

" It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech startups are solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand, because that's who thinks them up. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 'The Assassins' Gate' is a very tightly controlled story of the ideas that led to the war and the consequences of those ideas in Iraq, and there is no doubt about where it is going and what kind of groundwork is being laid. "

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

" We have at least learned that the offspring of presidents don't necessarily make good politicians themselves. "

" 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. "

" All over Africa, people are wearing what Americans once wore and no longer want. Visit the continent, and you'll find faded remnants of secondhand clothing in the strangest of places. "

" 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.' "

" Pay attention to other people's nightmares because they might be contagious. "

" Politics demands certain skills honed by experience, just as journalism does, just as acting does. "

" 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. "

" 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

" If giving money to a politician prejudiced my ability to think and write honestly, I wouldn't do it. Fortunately, it doesn't. "

" 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. "

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

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

" Mark Zuckerberg has started an advocacy group for immigration reform. "

" Even while writing about foreign places, I have been in a way writing about America, because that's the subject that interests me the most. I'm attached to it, critical, but it's definitely my country, and maybe even more so when I'm overseas. "

" 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

" Discerning the legal difference between what WikiLeaks did and what news organizations do is difficult and would set a terrible precedent. "

" Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems. "

" Oprah is just this goddess presiding over so much of American life, and her story is really interesting - the way she made herself, and the ruthlessness it took, and also the fantasizing that it took. "

" WikiLeaks is not a news organization; it is a cell of activists that is releasing information designed to embarrass people in power. "

" '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. "

" 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. "

" A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. "

" The phrase 'change the world' is tossed around Silicon Valley conversations and business plans as freely as talk of 'early-stage investing' and 'beta tests.' "