Our Man Quotes

“If you look close enough and are in a bad mood, public service seems to be composed of paperwork and personal feuds.”
― George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

“All that accumulated experience—we Americans don’t want it. We’re almost embarrassed by it, except when we’re burying it. So we forget our mistakes or recoil from them, we swing wildly between superhuman exertion and sullen withdrawal, always looking for the answers in our own goodness and wisdom instead of where they lie, out in the world, and in history. I’m amazed we came through our half century on top as well as we did. Now it’s over.”
― George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

“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.”
― George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century

“The last time Holbrooke saw Blythe was in the fall of 1980, when he was in New York to finalize the divorce and to reaffirm the American vote for the Khmer Rouge seat at the United Nations. "Pol Pot, Dick?" Blythe said after they signed the papers. "How could you?”
― George Packer, Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century