George Packer famous quotes

06-18-2025

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.
-- George Packer

#Principles #Different #Answers
At the heart of the matter is a battle between wish and fear. Fear generally proves stronger than a wish, but it leaves a taste of disappointment on the tongue.
-- George Packer

#Disappointment #Fear #Heart
Character is destiny, and politicians usually get the scandals they deserve, with a sense of inevitability about them.
-- George Packer

#Character #Destiny #Scandal
Twitter is crack for media addicts,
-- George Packer

#Media #Cracks #Addict
Amazon's identity and goals are never clear and always fluid, which makes the company destabilizing and intimidating.
-- George Packer

#Goal #Identity #Amazon
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

#Age #Lines #Invisibility
Surrendering to jargon is a sign of journalism's dismal lack of self-confidence in the optimized age of content-management systems.
-- George Packer

#Self Confidence #Age #Jargon
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

#Apples #Oil #Google
Putin stands for the opposite of a universal ideology; he has become an arch-nationalist of a pre-Cold War type, making mystic appeals to motherland and religion.
-- George Packer

#War #Opposites #Arches
With work increasingly invisible, it's much harder to grasp the human effects, the social contours, of the Internet economy.
-- George Packer

#Internet #Invisible #Economy
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

#Gay #Games #Campaigns
It seems preposterous now, but Amazon began as a bookstore.
-- George Packer

#Amazon #Bookstores
It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.
-- George Packer

#Broken #Cliche
We will have a more just society as soon as we want one.
-- George Packer

#Want
Before the nineteen-seventies, most Republicans in Washington accepted the institutions of the welfare state, and most Democrats agreed with the logic of the Cold War. Despite the passions over various issues, government functioned pretty well. Legislators routinely crossed party lines when they voted, and when they drank; filibusters in the Senate were reserved for the biggest bills; think tanks produced independent research, not partisan talking points. The "D." or "R." after a politician's name did not tell you what he thought about everything, or everything you thought about him.
-- George Packer

#War #Party #Independent
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.
-- George Packer

#Party #Self #Broken

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