Michael Ignatieff Quotes

68 quotes in 1032 categories

• There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
• 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…
• Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.
• The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.
• 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…
• Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.
• If I am not elected, I imagine that I will ask Harvard to let me back.
• How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
• To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.
• There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.
• In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the…
• 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…
• All war aims for impunity.
• It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• Canadians want a country. They don't want a community of communities. I'm committed to the national unity of the country.
• I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

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