David Ignatius Quotes

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  • Journalist
  • born 1950
  • 106 quotes

David Ignatius, a journalist (born 1950), is quoted 106 times on QuoteForever. The subjects that come up most often are Planning, Tolerance, Panic and Economic.

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Luck is the residue of good planning.

Retrospective analysis is not a useful guide to current problems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

'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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I think Republicans so mistrust Barack Obama, that if Barack Obama says Putin is terrible, they will be some Republicans who just take the other side.

We haven't usually had to face the extreme questions about liberty and order because we're not a nation of extremists. We love freedom and good government both.

Moscow and Washington have evolved a delicate process for 'de-confliction' in the tight Syrian airspace, where accidents or miscommunication could be disastrous.

The attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi has become a political football in the presidential campaign, with all the grandstanding and misinformation that entails.

David Ignatius is quoted on

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