George Packer Quotes About War

Quotes about: War

• 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

• I am reading "The Yellow Birds" by Kevin Powers and "Redeployment" by Phil Klay . Both Powers and Klay are Iraq War vets. Klay's stories are remarkable.

  George Packer

  War, Reading, Iraq

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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

  George Packer

  Goodbye, War, Writing

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• Since I was a kid. I had this series by Ballantine Books about the history of World Wars I and II. In my 20s, it was the Vietnam War literature of novelists like Tim O'Brien, Philip Caputo, and Tobias Wolff, and then nonfiction such as "A Bright Shining Lie" by Neil Sheehan and "The Best and Brightest" by David Halberstam . Those are the two best histories of Vietnam.

  George Packer

  Lying, War, Book

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• The literature of the Spanish Civil War is also important to me. Above all George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" as well as the writing of John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway. They worked on a film together in Spain during that war, which ended their friendship.

  George Packer

  War, Writing, Together

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• 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.

  George Packer

  Stress, War, Character

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• 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

  "Terms of Crisis" by George Packer, www.newyorker.com. March 31, 2014.

• One book that I heard was circulating the Green Zone was "Bureaucracy Does Its Thing" by Robert Komer , who worked for President [Lindon] Johnson in Saigon. This book is about the inevitably of screwing up when a country takes on a war with so little understanding of the country they are fighting.

  George Packer

  Country, War, Book

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• The Petraeus-Crocker testimony is the kind of short-lived event on which the Administration has relied to shore up support for the war: the 'Mission Accomplished' declaration, the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein, Saddam's capture, the transfer of sovereignty, the three rounds of voting, the Plan for Victory, the death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Every new milestone, however illusory, allows the Administration to avoid thinking ahead, to the years when the mistakes of Iraq will continue to haunt the U.S.

  George Packer

  War, Mistake, Thinking

  "Planning for Defeat" by George Packer, www.newyorker.com. September 17, 2007.

• Depended on the soldier. To relax, most of them put on headphones or played video games. Later in the war some of the younger officers began to read a lot of anthropology because they realized that the basic problem was that they were trying to fight a war in a culture they didn't understand. They might have read someone like Margaret Mead.

  George Packer

  War, Fighting, Games

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

• I'm reading a bunch of fiction by Afghan and Iraq War veterans for a New Yorker piece. There hasn't been that much, but it's starting to come out, and some of the fiction is really good.

  George Packer

  War, Reading, Iraq

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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