Top 100 Michael Ignatieff Quotes
#1. One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.
Michael Ignatieff
#2. Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument
that our future is being shaped far away 'at the ends of the earth'
makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading.
Michael Ignatieff
#4. When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.
Michael Ignatieff
#5. Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that only those who are born in a place or who adopt its citizenship can hope to understand.
Michael Ignatieff
#6. I am an English-speaking Canadian, but my entire family - Russian exiles and the Canadians they married - is buried in Quebec, and if Quebec were to separate, I would feel I had been cut in two.
Michael Ignatieff
#7. There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.
Michael Ignatieff
#8. Democratic constitutions do allow some suspension of rights in states of emergency. Thus rights are not always trumps. But neither is necessity. Even in times of real danger, political authorities have to prove the case that abridgments of rights are justified.
Michael Ignatieff
#9. To imagine Canada as a citizen requires that you enter into he mind of someone who does not believe what you believe or share what matters to you.
Michael Ignatieff
#10. I had the vocation for politics. What I didn't have was any aptitude for political combat. I took the attacks personally, which is a great mistake. It's never personal: It's just business. It was ever thus.
Michael Ignatieff
#11. Both Iraq and Syria are a fissile mixture of ethnicities and religions thrown together after Versailles by departing French and British imperialists and only kept together by Baathist tyranny and violence.
Michael Ignatieff
#12. Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.
Michael Ignatieff
#13. An ethnic minority can live in peace with an ethnic majority as long as the majority does not use its preponderance to turn the institutions of the state into an instrument of ethnic favoritism or ethnic justice.
Michael Ignatieff
#14. No human difference matters much until it becomes a privilege, until it becomes the basis for oppression. Power is the vector that turns minor into major.
Michael Ignatieff
#15. There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
Michael Ignatieff
#16. 'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.
Michael Ignatieff
#17. Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review.
Michael Ignatieff
#18. There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.
Michael Ignatieff
#19. There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don't yet have states. They're inside someone else's state and they want a state of their own.
Michael Ignatieff
#20. All the best reasons for going into politics never really change: the desire for glory and fame and the chance to do something that really matters, that will make life better for a lot of people.
Michael Ignatieff
#21. Well, I'm an absolute fan of lacy lingerie. I want to make that perfectly clear.
Michael Ignatieff
#22. It turns out that there is nothing so 'ex' as an ex-politician, especially a defeated one. Your phone goes dead.
Michael Ignatieff
#23. What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak.
Michael Ignatieff
#24. Politics is intensely physical: your hands touch, clasp and hold, and your eyes are always reaching for contact. None of this came naturally to me. I'd always put my trust in words and let the words do the work, but in politics, the real message is physical.
Michael Ignatieff
#25. I teach students that what people say about failure in politics is mostly wrong. People always told me, 'They'll praise you on your way up and kick you on your way down.' That wasn't my experience. I can't walk down the street in Toronto without someone coming up and saying hello.
Michael Ignatieff
#27. I've been both a journalist and a politician, and I can tell you it is more fun to ask the questions than have to answer them.
Michael Ignatieff
#28. Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces.
Michael Ignatieff
#30. The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible poltical goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence ...
Michael Ignatieff
#31. The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.
Michael Ignatieff
#32. Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.
Michael Ignatieff
#33. For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Cote d'Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.
Michael Ignatieff
#34. I can't think of this country without Quebec. Je parle francais. And when I think about being a Canadian, speaking French is part of it.
Michael Ignatieff
#35. There is a subtle yet profound difference between giving up and letting go' Just let go. Look at me, Moe seems to say. I can't speak, I can't move, but by my soul I know what this life is for.
Michael Ignatieff
#36. Conservatives believe that international institutions such as the United Nations are anti-American and anti-Israeli cabals. Progressives do not like the economic medicine that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank force down the throats of developing countries.
Michael Ignatieff
#37. I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa, you try to make every barbecue, festival, parade and charity run, but sometimes you feel pulled in 14 directions at once.
Michael Ignatieff
#38. We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.
Michael Ignatieff
#39. Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.
Michael Ignatieff
#40. America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order.
Michael Ignatieff
#41. America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, professional armed forces from the ground up.
Michael Ignatieff
#43. Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.
Michael Ignatieff
#44. Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.
Michael Ignatieff
#45. An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician's interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea's time has come.
Michael Ignatieff
#48. There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
Michael Ignatieff
#49. Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading.
Michael Ignatieff
#50. Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.
Michael Ignatieff
#51. Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
Michael Ignatieff
#52. After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what?
Michael Ignatieff
#53. Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.
Michael Ignatieff
#54. Ultimate authority in a global system remains with sovereigns. Governments will not have it any other way: politicians face instant rejection from their electorate if they allow transnational authorities to dictate terms.
Michael Ignatieff
#55. There's a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it's all about, so they spin 24 hours a day and that's a problem.
Michael Ignatieff
#56. Because we remain a land of hope and opportunity, and new Canadians see in our unfinished destiny an image of their own unfinished destines.
Michael Ignatieff
#58. The war waged against terror since September 11 puts a strain on democracy itself, because it is mostly waged in secret, using means that are at the edge of both law and morality. Yet democracies have shown themselves capable of keeping the secret exercise of power under control.
Michael Ignatieff
#59. The [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.
Michael Ignatieff
#60. Nationalism is a distorting mirror in which believers see their simple ethnic, religious, or territorial attributes transformed into glorious attributes and qualities.
Michael Ignatieff
#61. A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders.
Michael Ignatieff
#62. It is fear that turns minor difference into major, that makes the gulf between ethnicities into a distinction between species, between human and non-human.
Michael Ignatieff
#63. Our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
Michael Ignatieff
#64. I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.
Michael Ignatieff
#65. In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.
Michael Ignatieff
#66. For someone like me who, as a kid, walked to school muttering little political speeches to myself, it was irresistible to finally get a chance at political life for real. When the people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore elected me their MP, it changed me forever.
Michael Ignatieff
#67. Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit.
Michael Ignatieff
#68. Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, 'Those who can, do, those who can't, teach,' forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.
Michael Ignatieff
#69. 'The Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time.
Michael Ignatieff
#70. The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.
Michael Ignatieff
#71. Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.
Michael Ignatieff
#72. Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.
Michael Ignatieff
#74. Lincoln was not an intellectual, but no one in 200 years understood the language of the King James Bible or learned Blackstone's Laws of England, or Cicero, or the language of the Founding Fathers, better than he did.
Michael Ignatieff
#75. In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness. It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean.
Michael Ignatieff
#76. I don't want to be someone sitting in my rocking chair at the end saying, 'Well, I passed.' My mum used to say life isn't for sissies.
Michael Ignatieff
#77. The legitimacy of coercive acts in a democracy arises from the process by which they are justified and by the degree to which we regard decisions as rational. If the justifications proceed properly, through recognized public institutions, and if they make sense to us, they are legitimate.
Michael Ignatieff
#78. I had a feeling of shame about my grief, as if I was making false amends for the bitterness I felt towards him when he was alive.
Michael Ignatieff
#79. Not even a superpower can hold onto its economic sovereignty if it fails to get its fiscal house in order, and no one needs a well-regulated international economic order more than the United States.
Michael Ignatieff
#80. She painted because she loved to paint. She never exhibited. She had no career, no ambitions for her work except that it be good, and she didn't care what we thought of it.
Michael Ignatieff
#81. Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.
Michael Ignatieff
#82. I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.
Michael Ignatieff
#83. I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.
Michael Ignatieff
#84. The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.
Michael Ignatieff
#85. Canadians want a country. They don't want a community of communities. I'm committed to the national unity of the country.
Michael Ignatieff
#86. The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.
Michael Ignatieff
#87. Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.
Michael Ignatieff
#89. If the only people who can succeed in politics are people who go in at 25, that'd be too bad. That'd be a shame.
Michael Ignatieff
#90. A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.
Michael Ignatieff
#91. I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.
Michael Ignatieff
#92. America's entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don't like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America's legions of soldiers, spooks and special forces straddling the globe?
Michael Ignatieff
#93. If I am not elected, I imagine that I will ask Harvard to let me back.
Michael Ignatieff
#94. Politics isn't a reality show or a gong show. It's not show business for ugly people. It's the arena where we define our common life in a rough and ready contest that has winners and losers.
Michael Ignatieff
#96. I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.
Michael Ignatieff
#97. What's distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn't care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn't worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call 'the problem of dirty hands.'
Michael Ignatieff
#98. It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
Michael Ignatieff
#99. How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
Michael Ignatieff
#100. Secessionists, whether in Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec or anywhere else, invariably assume that a person must either be Scottish or British, Catalan or Spanish, Quebecois or Canadian. What about those who feel they are both?
Michael Ignatieff
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
