Quotes from George Packer

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?'

Afghanistan can't police its borders, and its neighbors give sanctuary and assistance to insurgents.

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

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

A curious thing about this rarefied world is that bloggers are almost unfailingly contemptuous toward everyone except one another.

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

Partly what I'm writing about is the way taboos get toppled.

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.

The difference between a reporter, a newspaper columnist, a paid speaker, a television personality, a radio talk show host, a blogger, a movie producer, a publicist, and a political strategist, is growing less - and not more - distinct.

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

As America has grown less economically equal, a citizen's ability to move upward has fallen behind that of citizens in other Western democracies. We are no longer the country where anyone can become anything.

Americans almost never elect presidents on the basis of foreign policy.

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

While starving refugees in Homs were providing target practice for government snipers, Bashar al-Assad's strongest international backer was in Sochi, at the Iceberg Skating Palace, visibly moved, smiling with deep satisfaction, as the Russians beautifully glided and leaped their way to the gold medal in the team event.

The reformocons court right-wing censure simply by acknowledging that the middle class is under pressure and that government has a role to play beyond cutting taxes.

I don't think they need to be nice to reporters, but the White House seems to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim.

In the extremity of war, character is revealed.

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.

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

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

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. In the extremity of war, character is revealed.

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.

I actually think that self-interest is overrated as an all-purpose guide to political motive. It leaves out something at least as powerful and immovable - individual psychology.

Climate change joined immigration, job creation, food safety, pilot training, veterans' care, campaign finance, transportation security, labor law, mine safety, wildfire management, and scores of executive and judicial appointments on the list of matters that the world's greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.