Quotes from George Packer

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

It might not be wise for a sometime political journalist to admit this, but the 2016 campaign doesn't seem like fun to me.

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.

How a candidate runs shapes how a president governs.

'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.

'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 really do put it on Bill Clinton's presidency as the time when the Democrats became the party of the college degree as the key to success in life.

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.

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.

Nowhere was the complacency of the establishment, with its blind faith in progress, more evident than in its attitude toward an elite degree: as long as my child goes to the right schools, upward mobility will continue. A university education had become the equivalent of a very expensive insurance policy, like owning a gun.

The problem came down to this: Americans, who had invented the modern assembly line, the skyscraper, the airplane, and the integrated circuit, no longer believed in the future.

O]nce demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn't much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate's mood.

Both Obama and Romney ended up in the wrong place: the former thought American exceptionalism was no longer true and should be given up while the latter thought it was still true. Neither was willing to tell Americans that they were no longer exceptional but should try to be again.

By the end he was living in each chapter of his life simultaneously—Kennedy and Obama, Vietnam and Bosnia and Afghanistan—as if he were floating in a single body of water whose temperature varied from place to place and depth to depth. All that accumulated experience—we Americans don't want it. We're almost embarrassed by it, except when we're burying it.

So these two classes, rising professionals and sinking workers, which a couple of generations ago were close in income and not so far apart in mores, no longer believe they belong to the same country. But they can't escape each other, and their coexistence breeds condescension, resentment, and shame.

To believe that Trump showed us who we really are is no different from believing that Obama showed us who we really are. Narcissism is expressed in extremes of self-contempt as well as self-adoration. Both are paralyzing.

If you look close enough and are in a bad mood, public service seems to be composed of paperwork and personal feuds.

In other words, Foxx represented what Sarah Palin (speaking at a campaign fundraiser in Greensboro three weeks before the election) called "the real America," by which she did not mean fallow farms and disability checks and crack.

When the norms that made the old institutions useful began to unwind, and the leaders abandoned their posts, the Roosevelt Republic that had reigned for almost half a century came undone. The void was filled by the default force in American life, organized money.

The unwinding brings freedom, more than the world has ever granted, and to more kinds of people than ever before—freedom to go away, freedom to return, freedom to change your story, get your facts, get hired, get fired, get high, marry, divorce, go broke, begin again, start a business, have it both ways, take it to the limit, walk away from the ruins, succeed beyond your dreams and boast about it, fail abjectly and try again.

Anybody who thinks factory jobs were good jobs needs to go visit somebody on a line," she said. "Most people wouldn't survive in a factory. Mitt Romney would die in a week.

And he began to understand how power worked in the White House. People didn't have it—they made it. If you wanted to be included in a meeting, you didn't wait for an invitation; you just showed up. He told Mikva, "If you don't use your power, you won't have any power.

The creation of virtual worlds had taken the place of advances in the physical world. "You can say the whole Internet has something very escapist to it

Neither was willing to tell Americans that they were no longer exceptional but should try to be again.