Michael Ignatieff Quotes & Sayings

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. — Michael Ignatieff

After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what? — Michael Ignatieff

By extrapolating a little from Freud, it becomes possible to think of nationalism as a kind of narcissism. A nationalist takes the neutral facts about a people - their language, habitat, culture, tradition and history- and turns these facts into a narrative, whose purpose is to illuminate the self-consciousness of a group, to enable them to think of themselves as a nation with a claim to self-determination. A nationalist, in other words, takes "minor differences"- indifferent in themselves- and transforms them into major differences. For this purpose, traditions are invented, a glorious past is gilded and refurbished for public consumption, and a people who might not have thought of themselves as a people at all suddenly begin to dream of themselves as a nation. — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

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. — Michael Ignatieff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis. — Michael Ignatieff

Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes. — Michael Ignatieff

All war aims for impunity. — Michael Ignatieff

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 only real remedy for regimes that live by terror. — Michael Ignatieff

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

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. — Michael Ignatieff

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

The [articles of the Genva Convention] adopted by The International Committee drew upon...the codes of a warrior's honour...these codes vary from culture to culture and their common features are the oldest artifacts of human morality: from Christian chivalry... to the Japanese Bushido or way of the warrior... The codes acknowledged the moral paradox of battle: that those who fight ...bravely are bound [by]...mutual respect... — Michael Ignatieff

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

It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves. — 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 spin 24 hours a day and that's a problem. — Michael Ignatieff

An ethnic minority can live in peace with an ethnic majority as long as the majority does not use its preponderance to turn the institutions of the state into an instrument of ethnic favoritism or ethnic justice. — Michael Ignatieff

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. — Michael Ignatieff

There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia. — 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. — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

I'm a Canadian. I've always been a Canadian. — Michael Ignatieff

There is a subtle yet profound difference between giving up and letting go' Just let go. Look at me, Moe seems to say. I can't speak, I can't move, but by my soul I know what this life is for. — Michael Ignatieff

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S. — Michael Ignatieff

It is fear that turns minor difference into major, that makes the gulf between ethnicities into a distinction between species, between human and non-human. — Michael Ignatieff

Loving a country is an act of the imagination. — Michael Ignatieff

The core of human rights work is naming and shaming those who commit abuses, and pressuring governments to put the screws to abusing states. As a result, human rights conventions are unique among international law instruments in depending for their enforcement mostly on the activism of a global civil society movement. — Michael Ignatieff

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. — Michael Ignatieff

Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare. — Michael Ignatieff

Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review. — Michael Ignatieff

The war waged against terror since September 11 puts a strain on democracy itself, because it is mostly waged in secret, using means that are at the edge of both law and morality. Yet democracies have shown themselves capable of keeping the secret exercise of power under control. — Michael Ignatieff

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam. — Michael Ignatieff

I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa, you try to make every barbecue, festival, parade and charity run, but sometimes you feel pulled in 14 directions at once. — Michael Ignatieff

A society is not a market. It is a political community. — Michael Ignatieff

America's entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don't like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America's legions of soldiers, spooks and special forces straddling the globe? — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification. — Michael Ignatieff

Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that only those who are born in a place or who adopt its citizenship can hope to understand. — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

The problem with nationalism is not the desire for self-determination itself, but the particular epistemological illusion that you can be at home, you can be understood, only among people like yourself. What is wrong with nationalism is not the desire to be a master in your own house, but the conviction that only people like yourself deserve to be in the house. — Michael Ignatieff

I've always thought Anne-Marie Slaughter would make a fantastic United States Senator or something. She's a real intellectual, but she's got enormous communicative skills and she's got government experience. The thing that drives me slightly crazy is the way we think about intellectuals as wooly, hopeless, arrogant, self-deceived, incapable. — 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 him if I carried on as before, if I went through the motions of living
that must have driven my family apart from me. I still do not understand those instincts that lead you to flee the ones who want to help you, that lead you to take revenge upon them for a sorrow that is not their fault. — Michael Ignatieff

I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league. — 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 will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control. — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

Politics is intensely physical: your hands touch, clasp and hold, and your eyes are always reaching for contact. None of this came naturally to me. I'd always put my trust in words and let the words do the work, but in politics, the real message is physical. — Michael Ignatieff

It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher. — 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 is a great mistake. It's never personal: It's just business. It was ever thus. — Michael Ignatieff

I went into politics thinking that, if I made arguments in good faith, I'd get a hearing. It's a reasonable assumption, but it's wrong. In five and a half years in politics up north, no one really bothered to criticize my ideas, such as they were. It was never my message that was the issue. It was always the messenger. — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

Nationalism is a distorting mirror in which believers see their simple ethnic, religious, or territorial attributes transformed into glorious attributes and qualities. — Michael Ignatieff

What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak. — 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.' — Michael Ignatieff

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

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

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

Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument
that our future is being shaped far away 'at the ends of the earth'
makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading. — Michael Ignatieff

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. — Michael Ignatieff

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

There are no techniques in politics. — Michael Ignatieff

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

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

America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order. — Michael Ignatieff

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

When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority. — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

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. — Michael Ignatieff

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. — Michael Ignatieff

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

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

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 state of their own. — 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 our common life in a rough and ready contest that has winners and losers. — 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 readership. In The Ingenuity Gap he wants us all to wake-up to the fearful possibility that our blithe trust in science and technology may be misplaced. Human ingenuity may not be capable of coping with two emerging crises of this century and the next: population growth and environmental despoliation. Read Homer Dixon's wake-up call and you will see the future very differently. — Michael Ignatieff

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

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society. — Michael Ignatieff

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty. — Michael Ignatieff

It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy. — Michael Ignatieff

The legitimacy of coercive acts in a democracy arises from the process by which they are justified and by the degree to which we regard decisions as rational. If the justifications proceed properly, through recognized public institutions, and if they make sense to us, they are legitimate. — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state. — Michael Ignatieff

She painted because she loved to paint. She never exhibited. She had no career, no ambitions for her work except that it be good, and she didn't care what we thought of it. — Michael Ignatieff

No human difference matters much until it becomes a privilege, until it becomes the basis for oppression. Power is the vector that turns minor into major. — Michael Ignatieff

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

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. — Michael Ignatieff