Michael Ignatieff quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Michael Ignatieff on Wise Famous Quotes.

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.

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

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

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

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

It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.

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

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

All war aims for impunity.

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

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

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.

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.

Loving a country is an act of the imagination.

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

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

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

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

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

Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit.

I can't think of this country without Quebec. Je parle francais. And when I think about being a Canadian, speaking French is part of it.

I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

Because we remain a land of hope and opportunity, and new Canadians see in our unfinished destiny an image of their own unfinished destines.

There are no techniques in politics.

I had a feeling of shame about my grief, as if I was making false amends for the bitterness I felt towards him when he was alive.

I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.

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

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

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

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

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

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

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

To imagine Canada as a citizen requires that you enter into he mind of someone who does not believe what you believe or share what matters to you.

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.