Top 106 Quotes & Sayings by David Ignatius - Page 2

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.

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

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

Big mistakes were made in Benghazi, and people should be held accountable. But the brave officers who staff American posts in crisis zones know how dangerous the work is.

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

The nation's chronic weakness is its political system, which is nearing dysfunction. If the U.S. can elect better political leadership, it should be able to manage problems better than most competitors.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Maybe it's the spy novelist in me looking for a future plot, but I hope the U.S. and its allies are thinking how to operate 'unconventionally' in Iraq and Syria in ways that undermine the Islamic State.

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.

Prominent scientists have become increasingly convinced that the connection between carbon emissions and rising temperatures is real, but skeptics have whole truckloads of studies to demonstrate the opposite.

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

Helping Wall Street regain confidence and stability was the last thing an angry public wanted in 2009 after the markets crashed. But without such support, markets can buckle and liquidity can disappear - often for decades, as has been the case in Japan.

This is a universal human dream - that brains, not brawn, will rule - and the fact that America has the world's finest institutions of higher education may be our greatest single national asset.

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

It's easier for China to assert its maritime power by creating artificial islands in the South China Sea than by defying the U.S. Pacific Fleet with an aircraft carrier.

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.

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.

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.

If you want better behavior from bankers, then make their financial incentives more like those in the hedge-fund world - where managers have 'skin in the game,' and their net worth is tied to their long-term performance.

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

My guess is that before Obama departs, he will adopt some of the more aggressive military options he has been resisting, such as 'safe zones' inside Syria and more aggressive deployment of U.S. special forces.

'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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

It's very hard to understand just what our strategy is in Syria, frankly, and on Iraq that this is Iraq's war, that the role of the United States is to help Iraq, to arm, train, support, provide air support, but this has to be Iraq's war.

Iran is also engaged in the fight against ISIL for reasons of its own that include a desire not to see a reasonably friendly government in Baghdad falling. But it also includes its desire not to have ISIL's ideology spread in the region where it lives

If democracy succeeds in Egypt, other countries will follow. Should the democratic experiment in Egypt be hijacked by the military or anti-democratic Islamist groups, the revolution will fail elsewhere.

A change of strategy suggests there is a strategy. I don't see a strategy that deals with - that concerns with dealing wit with ISIL overall. There is some sort of strategy for dealing with it in Iraq. I'm not sure there is one in Syria. And Libya is another problem altogether.

But the U.S. has to be careful. If our strategy depends on Sunnis doing the fighting to clear Mosul and Ramadi - and, as near as I can tell, that is the strategy - then you have to be careful that Sunnis don't perceive the U.S. to be operating arm in arm with Iran or with Iranian-backed Shiite militias that Abadi - Prime Minister Abadi is using in Iraq, so that, in effect, we're fronting for Iran.

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

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

Luck is the residue of good planning.

Retrospective analysis is not a useful guide to current problems.

Well, I think the U.S. has been careful not to go too far in attacking Iran's allies, in particular in attacking Hezbollah forces in Syria, which have been propping up the regime of Bashar al-Assad.

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.

U.S. has been trying to encourage Iraq to pass a law that would provide money and training and weapons for a Sunni national guard that could be effective in places like Ramadi, like Mosul

Global warming ... may be a plaintiff lawyer's dream. And it's interesting, in a perverse way, to imagine how a jury in 2050 might react to some of the recent industry-backed studies minimizing the dangers of global warming. I suspect future jurors will not be amused.