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" A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news. "
Michael Ignatieff
News
Simple
Only
Related Quotes:
" What we want is to become masters in our own house. "
Michael Ignatieff
Our
Want
Masters
" 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
Hope
Place
Democracy
" 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
End
Sitting
Saying
" In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with. "
Michael Ignatieff
False
Fun
Useless
" A society is not a market. It is a political community. "
Michael Ignatieff
Society
Political
Market
" 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
Fire
Go
Democracy
" We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it. "
Michael Ignatieff
Wanted
Got
Know
" 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. "
Michael Ignatieff
Experience
Politics
Failure
" Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society. "
Michael Ignatieff
Patriotism
Society
Successful
" 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
World
Politics
People
" 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
Bible
Better
Years
" 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. "
Michael Ignatieff
Say
Men
History
" 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
Democracy
Like
Trouble
" 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. "
Michael Ignatieff
Myself
Political
People
" 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
Just
Business
Great
" '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
Books
Book
Evil
" 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
Problem
Think
Night
" 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
Support
Political
War
" Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application. "
Michael Ignatieff
American
Leadership
Legal
" I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language. "
Michael Ignatieff
Heart
Liberal
Language
" 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
People
Over
Communism
" Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading. "
Michael Ignatieff
Politics
Friends
Know
" 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
Night
Boy
Copy
" 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
Admire
Our
Leaders
" 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
World
Who
Want
" 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
Good
War
Experience
" 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
I Think
Country
Quebec
" America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order. "
Michael Ignatieff
Realism
Creating
Country
" 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
Politicians
Face
Authority
" 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
Care
Evil
Worry