Argument Quote by Michael Ignatieff

“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

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Argument Collections Culture Family Family tradition Fierce Letters Longing Memories Nostalgia Shapes Tradition Trying Unrequited Whole life

More by Michael Ignatieff

The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is…

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What really matters is getting new people in. The constitutional changes matter, but the thing that the party mustn't do is turn in on…

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

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

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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…

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

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

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Both Iraq and Syria are a fissile mixture of ethnicities and religions thrown together after Versailles by departing French and British imperialists and only…

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The legitimacy of coercive acts in a democracy arises from the process by which they are justified and by the degree to which we…

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Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.

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If you get the access to see history happen, do you understand the history when it does happen? And the answer to that question…

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I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it…

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