Michael Ignatieff Quotes
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Liberals don't want any part of Canada left behind. I used to give speeches on and on and on about the fact that we don't want to have a country where you think, "my kids have got to move to the city if they're going to have any kind of future." We've been saying that, and we've not got through.
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How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
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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.
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Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.
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No kid graduating in a political science class in Canada should not understand what's happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It's the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies.
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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 is no, you dont.
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Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.
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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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I'm very struck by what you can do in a classroom. I've got 200 students. You don't do partisan politics in a classroom, that's not appropriate. But you want to give them a strong sense that these are the issues that matter.
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If I am not elected, I imagine that I will ask Harvard to let me back.
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You can't get back to power by defining your project in negative terms. But it helps to have somebody in office who represents the opposite of what you believe.
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The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it's all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation - the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope - more clearly.
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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 a state of their own.
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We must not lose sight of the fundamental issue of policy which is that people who come to the country on visa status must never be abused.
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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.
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There are a lot of young Canadians who want to be politically active at their college or their university who can't go to the party convention, who can't take part in politics, because they're holding down a job to pay their tuition. These are kids who want to do public service, who want to get involved politically, but their financial situation is precarious.
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You're never really out of politics.
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The Liberal Party of Canada has no monopoly on public service, we have no monopoly on virtue, and we have no monopoly on wisdom.
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Well, I'm an absolute fan of lacy lingerie. I want to make that perfectly clear.
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Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.
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The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible poltical goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence.
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There are all kinds of different forms of public service, but there's no form of public service that can make more difference for more people than partisan political activity.
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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?
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It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
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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.
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One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.
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They [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.
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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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There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.
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One of the biggest divides in Canada - I said it in 2006, and I said it right through my political career - is urban-rural. Lots of parts of this country feel entirely left behind. And they're mobilized by, you know, the gun control issue.
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