Top 130 Quotes & Sayings by Michael Ignatieff - Page 2

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

There are no techniques in politics.

'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

The Conservatives hold rural places because they keep bombarding rural Canada with, "Liberals are a bunch of urban, metropolitan snobs who don't care about you and want to leave you dead by the roadside." We've simply got to go out and say, "they're lying to you about us. We actually care about you more than the other guys, and we're not going to pander to your prejudices - we're going to give hope to your kids."

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.

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.

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.

Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders.

Public service does not necessarily mean service in the House of Commons, and public service is not synonymous with partisan political activity. It comes in a thousand colours, but the common denominator is: it's not about me - it's about we.

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.

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.

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

You're never really out of politics.

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.

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

What really matters is getting new people in. The constitutional changes matter, but the thing that the party mustn't do is turn in on itself and think the thing we've got to do is fix our plumbing. The thing we've got to do is get new people in.

The party's got to see itself as being one public service organization in a very competitive field, all of whom are competing for the allegiance and commitment and brains of the next generation. They've got to be big enough to reach out to those groups and say "come on in."

The Liberal Party of Canada has no monopoly on public service, we have no monopoly on virtue, and we have no monopoly on wisdom.

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.

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.

We can't afford to waste people. We can't afford to have people think the game is over before it's begun. We've got to be saying to the Canadian people: you can't tax cut your way to a productive 21st-century economy. You can talk that talk, but it's not going to give you a productive 21st-century economy, because it will scythe apart the public goods that make prosperity possible. That's what we've got to say, and so we shall.

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

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.

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.

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 cant, teach, forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.

Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.

Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.