Top 55 Michael Ignatieff Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

‘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.

There are no techniques in politics.

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.

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.’

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 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.

Loving a country is an act of the imagination.

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.

For someone like me who, as a kid, walked to school muttering little political speeches to myself, it was irresistible to finally get a chance at political life for real. When the people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore elected me their MP, it changed me forever.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.