David Ignatius Quotes

Author Image

David Ignatius

Profession : Journalist

Birth : May 26, 1950

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

David Ignatius

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

David Ignatius

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

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.

David Ignatius

2011 was a year in which events rarely turned out as predicted, and when much of the world seemed shrouded in turmoil and uncertainty. It was difficult for government analysts back in Washington to know just where they were on the map, let alone where they were heading.

David Ignatius

If you walk into the front hallway of the CIA, you will see, on your left, a statue of William 'Wild Bill' Donovan. Bill Donovan was the person who created the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, which was America's spy agency during World War II and then kind of morphed into what's now the CIA.

David Ignatius

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

We're grappling with the same issue facing all advanced economies - how to revive growth and distribute its fruits more fairly. An America that can tackle that problem head-on can perhaps help revive a stagnant global economy.

David Ignatius

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

David Ignatius

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

David Ignatius

Bob Gates has unusual standing in the debate about the Obama administration's foreign policy: He was defense secretary for both a hawkish President George W. Bush and a wary President Obama. He understood Bush's desire to project power and Obama's skepticism.

David Ignatius

The secret of any kind of reporting is to go with a guide. So if you, you're going to see Hezbollah in Beirut, you go with someone who knows the local people, and you'll be fine.

David Ignatius

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

David Ignatius

Machiavelli did believe that it was better to appear to be good than to be good. If you're good, you're just too vulnerable, but if you appear to be good, you get all the benefits plus you can be sneaky and, when necessary, stab someone in the back.

David Ignatius

The truth is, as you know, people like us look at what's happening in the world, and then we project it forward. We think, 'If I know A and B, then I've got to know that C and D are coming,' and that's kind of the way it's been with my fiction.

David Ignatius

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

The world has changed, the CIA is having to change, and again, the challenge for someone like me as a spy novelist is to write realistically about where they're actually going.

David Ignatius

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

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

David Ignatius

As so many writers know, the experience of creating an imaginary world is closer to dreaming than it is to normal, grit-your-teeth work. It's preconscious rather than conscious. Ideas fall into your head, and the book writes you, rather than the other way around.

David Ignatius