Michael Ignatieff Quotes

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.

Well, I'm an absolute fan of lacy lingerie. I want to make that perfectly clear.

There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.

There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

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.

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.

Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.

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.

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.

The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.

The Liberal Party of Canada has no monopoly on public service, we have no monopoly on virtue, and we have no monopoly on wisdom.

If I am not elected, I imagine that I will ask Harvard to let me back.

Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.

Canadians want a country. They don't want a community of communities. I'm committed to the national unity of the country.

To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.

...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

You can't get back to power by defining your project in negative terms. But it helps to have somebody in office who represents the opposite of what you believe.

How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?

There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.

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.

The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.

If you get the access to see history happen, do you understand the history when it does happen? And the answer to that question is no, you dont.

Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.

They [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.

All war aims for impunity.

Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.

You're never really out of politics.

We must not lose sight of the fundamental issue of policy which is that people who come to the country on visa status must never be abused.

There are all kinds of different forms of public service, but there's no form of public service that can make more difference for more people than partisan political activity.

Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

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.

Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes.

Loving a country is an act of the imagination.

Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.

Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.