Quotes from David Ignatius

Real power around the world does not reside with governments any longer, but with private interests. Real power is secret power.

situation is clear, because by then it may be too late. 3) Keep moving until you find cover or you're out of the fire zone.

Showing emotion was bad. Unless it was fake, then it was okay.

admonition: "Fear your enemy once, fear your friend a thousand times.

Awal zaan resto jahan. First yourself, then the universe.

And you realized, once inside the Secret Service cordon, that the president of the United States was just a politician, surrounded by courtiers and glad-handers and people seeking favors. He was as prone to making stupid decisions as any other politician, maybe more so. The real secret about the White House was that it was so ordinary—mediocrity on steroids.

To the north of this pleasant robot of a city was the Malay Peninsula;

Serdukov looked at the coast, assaulted by waves, rocks becoming sand.

He liked to collect rocks. That day, he had gathered one from near the path down Longevity Hill toward the water. It was a fine-grained piece of granite that he found under a mulberry tree. He took it from his pocket now and, as was his practice, he inscribed the time and place he had found it, in tiny characters, on the rock. He would add it to his collection, hundreds of stones neatly aligned on his shelves at home, so that he could remember

To the west, upriver, was the compact epicenter of national government: Congress, the civilian agencies, the White House, the monuments and museums, all arranged symmetrically as if the federal establishment were a formal garden. The president was weak, it was universally believed; the Congress was enfeebled by partisan divisions; it was as if the balance wheel had broken and the real work of the government had stopped, but the garden remained immaculate.

In the decade I had been away something in the fabric of the country had dissolved. America wasn't one country anymore—it was two, or a dozen, or a thousand. The extremes of wealth and color and caste felt more like Cairo or Johannesburg than any American city I remembered.

deputy information

I'm not authorizing anything that would require my authorization," said Hoffman. "Got that?" Rogers said yes. "If that's understood, then you have my authorization

The child was born in the Arab world, and in that sense, Roger and Alice had gone into the land itself, been penetrated by it, bled into its veins (p. 349).

Life was about improvisation. The scripted operations were the ones that usually went wrong.

General Wu was about to say something and then thought better of it. Li walked him down the stairs to his car. As the door opened, Li leaned over and whispered in the general's ear: "I tolerate much from my brother. We are a family. Please don't ever do that again.

The people who think they are safe must know what it is to be hunted.

Keep looking. I'd love to be able to start over again fresh. I'd love to look in that other person's face and see nothing but a clear reflection. Maybe this time I'd be more careful not to damage it.

name's Ma Daiyu. I'm sure she's heard

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. —Marcus Tullius Cicero

It was about how empires try to save themselves in their declining years." "How timely," said Stone. "And how did the Ottomans try to save themselves, if I may ask?" "By keeping their subjects at each other's throats. The Ottomans were masters at sowing dissension. It was one of the few things they were good at, actually.

Reading the stories was like trying to make out an object through the refracted light of a heavy snowstorm. He could see the snowflakes, immediate and particular, and he could discern the more distant objects that were coated in white: trees, roofs, roads, buildings. But he couldn't actually see any particular object for itself, only the covered outlines.

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.

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.