Quotes by George Packer

No one pretends anymore that the Olympics are just about sports. Its routine to talk about what effect holding the Games in this or that capital will have on the host countrys international reputation, how a nations prestige can be raised by its medal count.

The Olympics are never just about sports.

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.

Its essential for the U.S. and Europe to prevent Putin from going farther and reversing the hard-won independence of former Soviet republics.

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 worlds greatest deliberative body is incapable of addressing.

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 didnt take it as an encouraging sign.

Inspiration is an underexamined part of political life and presidential leadership.

Inequality saps the economy by draining the buying power of Americans whose incomes have stagnated, forcing them to rely on debt to fund education, housing, and health care.

Abstract sympathy with the working class as an economic entity is easy, but the feeling can vanish on contact with actual members of the group, who often arrive with disturbing beliefs and powerful resentments - who might not sound or look like people urban progressives want to know.

Whether as victim, demon, or hero, the industrial worker of the past century filled the public imagination in books, movies, news stories, and even popular songs, putting a grimy human face on capitalism while dramatizing the social changes and conflicts it brought.

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.

While starving refugees in Homs were providing target practice for government snipers, Bashar al-Assads 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.

Ive read a lot of war writing, even World War I writing, the British war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Gravess memoir Goodbye to All That, and a civilian memoir, Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain.

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