George Packer Quotes

There are more reasons for people's actions than the number of actions that are actually set in motion.

I think a lot of people are curious about what makes people do what they do, and I guess my curiosity isn't hidden in any way.

Everyone had a reason for everything they did, even if that reason was sometimes stupidity.

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

Rational behavior requires theory. Reactive behavior requires only reflex action.

It's very useful when politicians have doubts because there are so many choices to be made in the world.

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.

I think the Democratic Party has got to make fundamental choices.

The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstance.

In political matters feeling often decides more correctly than reason.

It's a fact of life that positive reasons don't always get people to vote. You need some negative reasons.

Thought is the organizing factor in man, intersected between the causal primary instincts and the resulting actions.

Elections are about choices. They're about distinguishing one from the other. There is a political element to that, and of course it has to do with policy, as well.

You can drive yourself crazy trying to peer into a person's soul--or you can do the sensible thing: ask not what inner motives drive a politician's policy choices but instead whether those choices are good for the country.

It is seldom that statesmen have the option of choosing between a good and an evil.

In fact, most of the time, people with similar information, similar beliefs and similar apparent choices will choose similar actions. So if you want to know why someone does what they do, start with what they know, what they believe and where they came from. Dismissing actions we don't admire merely because we don't care enough to have empathy is rarely going to help us make the change we seek. It doesn't help us understand, and it creates a gulf that drives us apart.

Politics is still crucially important. Our choices are vital, and we've got to make them and not just say, 'Oh they're all the same.' They are all the same in certain ways, alas - a political animal is such an animal.

Brains are like representative democracies. They are built of multiple, overlapping experts who weigh in and compete over different choices.

I'd love to be able to write an in-depth piece of what causes men like [Richard] Nixon and [H.R.]Haldeman and [John] Ehrlichman and all the rest of them not only to run, but what causes us to vote for them.

Politics cannot stop to study psychology Its methods are rough; its judgments rougher still.

Tell a man something is bad, and he's not at all sure he wants to give it up. Describe it as stupid, and he knows it's the better part of caution to listen.

Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute.

Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.

I tell people it's like shopping for a car.People are taking candidates out for a test drive, seeing what they like.