David Ignatius Quotes
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Things felt pretty crazy on earth in 1969, but the cosmos was friendly. Astronauts had round-trip tickets; they got home.
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Sometimes good countries are so traumatized by events that they lose their bearings and embrace bad leaders.
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The European Union needs to reinvent its security system. It needs to break the stovepipes that prevent sharing information, enforcing borders and protecting citizens.
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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.
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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.
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European Muslims need to feel ownership of security, rather than viewing the police as an occupying army.
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Chinese experts noted that the U.S. economy has rebounded from the 2008 crash more strongly than some analysts here had expected, while China's own growth is slowing after several decades of rocket-ship acceleration.
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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.
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Politicians need to rethink their reflexive invocations of the Second Amendment and the idea that the gun lobby is too powerful to challenge.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Making economic policy isn't a popularity contest, especially when financial markets are in a panic.
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Panic is a natural human response to danger, but it's one that severely compounds the risk.
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The worm of paranoia begins to eat into even the hardest adversary.
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Apple chief executive Tim Cook is such a respected figure that it's easy to overlook the basic problem with his argument about encryption: Cook is asserting that a private company and the interests of its customers should prevail over the public's interest as expressed by our courts.
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Politicians often call for sanctions as a way of sounding tough when they don't want to take riskier measures.
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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.
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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.
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Intelligence services exist to do things that are illegal abroad. They exist to tell lies.