QUOTES by Michael Ignatieff
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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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
It turns out that there is nothing so 'ex' as an ex-politician, especially a defeated one. Your phone goes dead.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.'
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.
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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.
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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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
I may have come into politics with an unacknowledged condescension toward the game and the people who played it, but I left with more respect for politicians than when I went in. The worst of them - the careerists and predators - you find in all professions. The best of them were a credit to democracy.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
'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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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?
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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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
Desert Storm was seen by the military establishment and by some politicians as avenging Vietnam, but it left behind dangerous illusions. The victory was so decisive, and information about it so carefully managed, that the American public was never clearly informed that it was purchased at the price of approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
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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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
Politics is a tough game. But would I change places with a trauma nurse in an emergency ward on a busy Saturday night? No way. There are lots of jobs in the world that are tougher than politics. And politicians and people who've done it need to remember that.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff
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.
Quote by -Michael Ignatieff