Quotes from George Packer

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.

To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world - and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales.

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.

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

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.

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.'

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.

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

Foreign policy exactly suits Obama's strong points as a leader, which turn out not to be giving the masses a clear sense of direction and hope, but instead exercising good judgment on a case-by-case basis while thinking many steps ahead of the present moment.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Every movement, to stay alive - a very difficult thing to do historically - has to find a way to harness that initial surge of emotion and turn it to the hard, steady, un-sexy work of recruiting new members, strategizing, negotiating with those in power, keeping itself going.

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.

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.

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.

It's a cliche that the Senate is broken, and like most cliches, it's true.

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.

What the Web has never figured out is how to pay for reporting, which, with the collapse of print newspapers, is in desperately short supply, and without which even the most prolific commenters will someday run out of things to say.