David Ignatius quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by David Ignatius

David Ignatius Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from David Ignatius on Wise Famous Quotes.

It is never too late to apply good sense as a corrective to stupidity.

American politics, like most things, is a story of what statisticians describe as the reversion to the mean.

I'm as prone to 'declinism' as the next over-mortgaged middle-aged guy.

In a chaotic world, U.S. diplomats will probably have even less contact with the people they need to reach.

Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy.

U.S. power flows from our unmatched military might, yes. But in a deeper way, it's a product of the dominance of the U.S. economy.

World War II provides a string of celebrated cases of deception and manipulation.

Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies.

Politicians often call for sanctions as a way of sounding tough when they don't want to take riskier measures.

Making economic policy isn't a popularity contest, especially when financial markets are in a panic.

I began writing fiction because it was the only way to tell all the intricacies of a real-life spy story.

Real security will come when it's a moneymaker for private companies who want to satisfy public demand for an Internet that isn't crawling with bugs.

The American experiment has always depended on a measure of tolerance and good sense.

The surest way to empower the new terrorist gangs would be to withdraw from U.S. diplomatic missions.

European Muslims need to feel ownership of security, rather than viewing the police as an occupying army.

Politicians need to rethink their reflexive invocations of the Second Amendment and the idea that the gun lobby is too powerful to challenge.

The value of catastrophic events is that they can help people face up to problems that are otherwise impossible to address.

When the big guys in Washington dream of transforming the world, it's the little guys who come home in body bags.

This experience of getting so lost in my writing that I lose track of time, or of anything outside the imagined world, is a release for me.

Saudi Arabia is a frightened monarchy. It's beset by Sunni extremists from the Islamic State and Shiite extremists backed by Iran.

We have a complicated intelligence relationship with France. We have a complicated intelligence relationship with other - with other allies.

Luck is the residue of good planning.

Things felt pretty crazy on earth in 1969, but the cosmos was friendly. Astronauts had round-trip tickets; they got home.

'Cyber-security' is one of those hot topics that has launched a thousand seminars and strategy papers without producing much in the way of policy.

The Chinese are planning a manned mission to the moon sometime after 2020, and subsequently, to Mars. The U.S. has abandoned that dream.

Fear brings out the best in some people and the worst in others. It's a test of character, for individuals and nations.

Retrospective analysis is not a useful guide to current problems.

The Founding Fathers' instructions were clear: The right to free speech includes bad speech; it means tolerance of ideas that many find obnoxious.

A world in which there are no secrets that can be protected at all is going to be a pretty dangerous world.

Journalists couldn't do their jobs overseas without taking risks, and the same is true for diplomats and intelligence officers.

Movies have a way of distilling moments in our culture, and 'Gravity' may be the defining film for the lost-in-space year of 2013: Nothing works.

The revival of the U.S. financial system after the crash of 2008 is arguably the Obama administration's biggest domestic policy success.

The worm of paranoia begins to eat into even the hardest adversary.

I believe, that there is at least de facto cooperation between United States and Iran, at least in Iraq.

Hedge-fund managers make too much money relative to their social utility. I wish their rewards were a bit closer to those of, say, schoolteachers.

During an economic crisis, what matters is that the government keeps its foot on the accelerator.

Russia isn't likely to have any more military success in Syria and Iraq than has the United States.

A disaffected America can be drawn into a civilized - but disruptive - dialogue about political change and reformation.

Gen. David Petraeus, commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Centcom, is probably the most decorated officer of his generation.

If you want to hear arguments against deploying a big U.S. ground force in Syria, just ask a general.

Yes, Europe needs to be more welcoming, but that's only half of it. Muslims need to embrace the obligations of European residence and citizenship.

Sometimes James Bond movies drive me crazy. They're fun to watch, but they don't have anything to do at all with what intelligence officers really do.

Foreign policy is about the execution of ideas as much as their formulation.

Sometimes good countries are so traumatized by events that they lose their bearings and embrace bad leaders.

Panic is a natural human response to danger, but it's one that severely compounds the risk.

Training a reliable military force that adheres to Western norms and standards is the work of a generation, not a few months.

It's a genuine dilemma for governments, deciding how much information to share in this threat-filled era.