Michael Ignatieff

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

— Michael Ignatieff

You're never really out of politics.

— Michael Ignatieff

I'm a Canadian. I've always been a Canadian.

— Michael Ignatieff

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.

— Michael Ignatieff

All war aims for impunity.

— Michael Ignatieff

There are no techniques in politics.

— Michael Ignatieff

What we want is to become masters in our own house.

— Michael Ignatieff

Loving a country is an act of the imagination.

— Michael Ignatieff

'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

A society is not a market. It is a political community.

— Michael Ignatieff

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

— Michael Ignatieff

Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading.

— Michael Ignatieff

There's a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it's all about, so they…

— Michael Ignatieff

I had the vocation for politics. What I didn't have was any aptitude for political combat. I took the attacks personally, which…

— Michael Ignatieff

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

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…

— Michael Ignatieff

It turns out that there is nothing so 'ex' as an ex-politician, especially a defeated one. Your phone goes dead.

— Michael Ignatieff

We must not lose sight of the fundamental issue of policy which is that people who come to the country on visa…

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war…

— Michael Ignatieff

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are…

— Michael Ignatieff

Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and…

— Michael Ignatieff

I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa,…

— Michael Ignatieff

Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of…

— Michael Ignatieff

Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and…

— Michael Ignatieff

Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral…

— Michael Ignatieff

Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that…

— Michael Ignatieff

Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action…

— Michael Ignatieff

“I do not know whether it is an act of faithfulness to her or a betrayal of the dignity she never lost,…

— Michael Ignatieff

Tad Homer-Dixon is a rare kind of public intellectual, who combines real expertise with a commitment to communicate to the widest possible…

— Michael Ignatieff

The Conservatives hold rural places because they keep bombarding rural Canada with, "Liberals are a bunch of urban, metropolitan snobs who don't…

— Michael Ignatieff

We can't afford to waste people. We can't afford to have people think the game is over before it's begun. We've got…

— Michael Ignatieff

“It is not the development of material need which sets the modern vocabulary of aspiration apart from anything which has gone before,…

— Michael Ignatieff

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas…

— Michael Ignatieff

“I admit I must have been impossible to live with. It was the self-righteousness of the grieving--my idea that I would betray…

— Michael Ignatieff

I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau.

— Michael Ignatieff