Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" I'm as prone to 'declinism' as the next over-mortgaged middle-aged guy. "
David Ignatius
Guy
Prone
Next
Related Quotes:
" Experts say that Britain and France have strong spy agencies; Germany's is competent but afraid to level with its public; the rest are relatively weak, and there is no Europe-wide spy agency. "
David Ignatius
Spy
Say
Rest
" The best restraint is old-fashioned market discipline, in which financial traders know that they, personally, will lose a ton of money if they take risky bets that don't pan out. "
David Ignatius
Financial
Best
Discipline
" Sometimes good countries are so traumatized by events that they lose their bearings and embrace bad leaders. "
David Ignatius
Sometimes
Bad
Events
" Making economic policy isn't a popularity contest, especially when financial markets are in a panic. "
David Ignatius
Economic
Panic
Policy
" Frightened people want to protect themselves, sometimes without thinking about others. Often, they get angry and want to find someone to blame for catastrophe. Inevitably, they spread information without checking if it's true. "
David Ignatius
True
Blame
People
" 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. "
David Ignatius
Wish
I Wish
Money
" 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. "
David Ignatius
Fun
Drive
Crazy
" The revival of the U.S. financial system after the crash of 2008 is arguably the Obama administration's biggest domestic policy success. "
David Ignatius
System
Policy
Financial
" Training a reliable military force that adheres to Western norms and standards is the work of a generation, not a few months. "
David Ignatius
Training
Work
Military
" Empty political space will be filled by extremists unless the United States and its allies build strong local forces that can suppress terrorist groups and warlords both. When the U.S. creates such local forces, it must be persistent. If it withdraws from these efforts, as America did in Iraq in 2011, it invites mayhem. "
David Ignatius
America
Strong
Political
" European Muslims need to feel ownership of security, rather than viewing the police as an occupying army. "
David Ignatius
Feel
Than
Army
" Moscow and Washington have evolved a delicate process for 'de-confliction' in the tight Syrian airspace, where accidents or miscommunication could be disastrous. "
David Ignatius
Accidents
Washington
Delicate
" Make the financial industry pay for its mistakes. That's the idea behind the best of the Obama administration's reform proposals: If banks issue securities backed by mortgages, say, then require them to hold some of that paper so that they will bear some of the losses. "
David Ignatius
Say
Best
Paper
" Saudi Arabia is a frightened monarchy. It's beset by Sunni extremists from the Islamic State and Shiite extremists backed by Iran. "
David Ignatius
Saudi
Iran
State
" The framers hated the tyranny of King George, but they were also afraid of the mob. That's why they put so many checks and balances into our system, to guard against the excesses of a government that might be inflamed by public passion or perverted by a dictator's whim. "
David Ignatius
King
Passion
Tyranny
" It's fashionable with the Sarah Palin set to attack Harvard and treat its graduates as elitists. But if you spend any time on campus, you see students drawn from all over the world - an astonishing number these days with roots in Asia - whose chief assets are brainpower and hard work. "
David Ignatius
Hard Work
Work
Time
" U.S. adversaries exploit power gaps. It's easier for Russia to invade Ukraine with irregular forces out of uniform, the so-called 'little green men,' than to send a conventional army that would challenge NATO. "
David Ignatius
Army
Green
Men
" Politicians often call for sanctions as a way of sounding tough when they don't want to take riskier measures. "
David Ignatius
Tough
Take
Politicians
" Panic is a natural human response to danger, but it's one that severely compounds the risk. "
David Ignatius
Human
Risk
Danger
" The ISI is above all a paramilitary organization. It doesn't do all that much collection of intelligence. It's not a very good spy agency, but it's good at running covert action. "
David Ignatius
Organization
Intelligence
Good
" At the center of President Obama's strategy for dealing with the Islamic State is an empty space. It's supposed be filled by a 'Sunni ground force,' but after more than a year of effort, it's still not there. Unless this gap is filled, Obama's plan won't work. "
David Ignatius
Space
Effort
Plan
" The surest way to empower the new terrorist gangs would be to withdraw from U.S. diplomatic missions. "
David Ignatius
Gangs
Way
Terrorist
" The CIA in real life, we know, is looking for new kinds of cover. It's looking for new platforms, as they like to say, and it's trying to use the revolution in communications technology, the ability to use all sorts of corporate entities in ways that are hard to detect to get our spies in the places where they need to be. "
David Ignatius
Life
Technology
Revolution
" What frustrates U.S. officials is that China sometimes seems more comfortable accommodating a strong United States, as it did in past decades, than partnering with an America that's less dominant. "
David Ignatius
More
Past
Strong
" When historians look at the Obama presidency, they're likely to credit him especially for doing the politically unpopular things that were needed in 2009 to salvage the financial wreckage. "
David Ignatius
Doing
Look
Credit
" Images sometimes capture particular periods in history. The unreachable green light, beckoning from across the bay in 'The Great Gatsby,' has become a symbol of the yearning of America in the 1920s. "
David Ignatius
Great
History
America
" The Founding Fathers' instructions were clear: The right to free speech includes bad speech; it means tolerance of ideas that many find obnoxious. "
David Ignatius
Ideas
Bad
Free
" Europeans don't like to talk about intelligence, and they often pretend their countries don't spy. "
David Ignatius
Pretend
Spy
Talk
" Russia isn't likely to have any more military success in Syria and Iraq than has the United States. "
David Ignatius
Military
Syria
Success
" CIA officers aren't idiots. They knew they were heading into deep water - legally and morally - when they signed up for the interrogation program. That's part of the agency's ethos - doing the hard jobs that other departments prudently avoid. "
David Ignatius
Avoid
Doing
Hard