Best The Unwinding: An Inner History Of The New America Quotes by George Packer

"We must face a time of national austerity. Hard choices are necessary if we want to avoid consequences that are even worse."

"What man could afford to pay for all the things a wife does, when she’s a cook, a mistress, a chauffeur, a nurse, a babysitter? But because of all this, I feel women ought to have equal rights."

"The leaders of industry, commerce and finance in the United States have broken and discarded the fragile, unwritten compact previously existing during a past period of growth and progress."

"Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you."

"That’s how the roads in this country were built, basically. The people that built the roads followed the animals’ paths. And once that path is set, it takes a tremendous amount of effort and energy to take another path. Because you get in that set pattern of thinking, and it’s passed down generation to generation to generation."

"Our country probably prospered as much as it’s ever going to prosper, right there in that era."

"Once you had that Sheet and Tube pay stub, you could go downtown, get you a refrigerator, get you anything—your credit was good. And you could get into the nightclubs."

"The idea that this was systemic didn’t occur."

"Let’s buy the damned thing and run it ourselves."

"If the institutions and the people who led them had understood what was about to happen to Youngstown, they might have worked out a policy to manage deindustrialization instead of simply allowing it to happen."

"It was one of the quietest revolutions we’ve ever had."

"If Oprah Winfrey can make it, what does it say about me?"

"You either control your mind or it controls you."

"For every adversity that comes into your life, there is a seed of equal benefit to it."

"It’s their lives they’ve become uncomfortable with, lives they see breaking down. They’d like to set things right, but they can’t."

"The late eighties through the nineties, Youngstown just got crazy, really crazy. When you think about it, there weren’t jobs."

"When you worked with people that long, you watched their children grow up in the pictures they showed."
9179812

"I wasn’t really entrenched in the stuff that was going on, because I had kids and I was trying to keep them out of it."

"Money never has meant that much to me. If we had enough groceries, and a nice place to live, plenty of room to keep and feed my bird dogs, a place to hunt, a place to play tennis, and the means to get the kids good educations—that’s rich. No question about it."

"They were going to have it better than my brothers. I did what I needed to do, and that is what my great-grandmother did."

"I had no doubt that this company has a chance to become the Microsoft of payments, the financial operating system of the world."

"I’m doing just fucking great. I’m working at a damn Bojangles’."

"I’ll be coming around—maybe more infrequently—but I’ll be trying and wanting to see you."

"The key to beating competitors on the Internet was viral growth."

"I want you to meet me at Fairy Stone State Park."

"I pay a little extra, but this is what I want to do."

"The best thing that could happen to this country is eight-dollar gas, because that would cause us to get off of it."

"I made a million dollars and I lost a million dollars."

"We are advocates of small-scale, farmer-owned biorefineries."

"It can be done, it will be done, it’s going to happen, you’ll see."

"The selling point wasn’t America’s Next Great City after all [...] What it offered was the American dream in a subdivision, the splendid isolation of a new homestead an hour’s drive from downtown."

"A few local critics pointed out the strategy’s resemblance to a Ponzi scheme. But everything kept growing and no one paid attention."

"No place was too remote or unpromising for development."

"There were no town centers out among the subdivisions, no towns at all, no hills to relieve the flatness, so that you never quite knew where you were without GPS."

"Other than minimum wage jobs at restaurants and big-box stores, it was hard to find work outside the real estate industry."

"Hillsborough and the neighboring counties became conservative, churchgoing country, with antiabortion signs and prophecies of Judgment Day scattered among the highway billboards."

"As long as more people came this year than last year, and next year than this year, there would always be more houses to build, and more jobs in construction and real estate and hospitality."

"Usha saved and saved, and she raised her children to do the same."

"They were living on food stamps, his wife’s disability, the grandson’s SSI, and charity."

"In a really unequal world, if you tried to keep up with the Joneses [...] then you would surely get lost, always feeling that you were falling farther behind."

"Our destiny is not written for us, but by us." - Barack Obama

"We want to do our task, our vocation, we want to provide, and I’m just so fucking furious that our government has ripped away our ability to provide anything." - Matt Weidner

"I spend more time at the McDonald’s drive-through window than people who were losing their homes got." - Sylvia Landis

"The only thing that is even remotely possible is massive worldwide debt repudiation. It all gets fucking burned up, because, if not, your son works for his entire life and never accumulates anything, because he is busy paying off personal debt and government debt and institutional debt." - Matt Weidner

"I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man. Let me handle my business, damn!" - Jay-Z

"He was lucky. The crack game didn’t end the rap game." - about Shawn Carter

"Our entire system of property ownership is in chaos and turmoil." - Matt Weidner

"These rappers are hoes, some white person takes all their money." - Shawn Carter's crew

"I sold kilos of coke, I’m guessing I can sell CDs." - Jay-Z

"I’d rather be broke and still kicking than not kicking. They can kill you but they can’t eat you, ain’t that the law?" - Jack E. Hamersma

"The titans of finance are up there in Gotham fighting over the carcass of Ciena, while at the same time Ciena’s tentacles are down here wrapped around Usha’s neck."

"The truth is, they don’t surround us. We surround them. This is our country."

"You work for us! You work for us! Tyranny! Tyranny!"

"They think they can take me down, that they can hurt me. It just makes me bigger … Fuck. You. John. Podesta."

"You’ve got to believe in something. I don’t believe in God—I believe in this."

"I’m tired of both parties not listening to what the people want, and the corruption, the inside deals, the backroom deals."

"We all knew each other, in a way. We didn’t know each other, but we all felt connected."

"This is going to be one of the great puzzles of history to figure out, when Obama became president, why Eric Holder didn’t decide to make this a priority."

"Senator Kaufman’s term, and my time as a Senate staffer, ends in twelve days, but this is not a fight for one senator to wage."

"It’s important that people in the country know we can have very strong differences, but we also can work together."

"I set out to prove they were all a bunch of cheaters. I was going to expose these people who were taking advantage of the rest of us."

"In the midst of this fiasco, Tammy lost her parents."

"I don’t need to go back to the boom-and-bust cycle."

"The only way anything was going to change would be by getting rid of capitalism."

"You work for what you have, that’s all anyone can do, and then all of a sudden the economy gets so bad and instead of thirty people looking for work there’s three thousand."

"This is the way we do things—high risk, high reward, leave it all on the table."

"Empires decline when elites become irresponsible."

"For every dollar his girlfriend put in her savings account, Kevin was buying forty dollars’ worth of bonds."

"It was kind of crazy, the whole thing was crazy, but she decided not to go home that night."

"If we demand something from Wall Street, we’re telling them that they have the power. And we have the power because we have strength in numbers."

"I went down there and didn’t realize it was going to change my life."

"The future is so-so, but you can sort of navigate through it if you have a house with a gun and an electric fence and a college degree."

"We have this messy real world where things are incredibly difficult and broken, and there are crazy politics, and it’s hard to get good people elected, the system doesn’t quite work."

"The whole Internet has something very escapist to it."

"Most dinners go on too long or not long enough."

"This is what makes us so powerful, because we can come together in a way that Adolf Hitler or Tojo or Khrushchev never could."

"The same key institutions continued to erode, with a lot of recession years and financial panics along the way."

"I think I’m getting the best possible things out of Stanford."