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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. "
Michael Ignatieff
Question
Time
Own
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" Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics. "
Michael Ignatieff
America
Politics
Patriotism
" Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process. "
Michael Ignatieff
Good
Seeing
Picture
" 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
" 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
Fun
Tell
I Can
" 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 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
Feel
Family
I Am
" 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
" 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
Religions
Tyranny
Violence
" 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
" 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
Hold
Sovereignty
More
" There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers. "
Michael Ignatieff
Financial
Soldiers
Real
" 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 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
Crazy
Political
Life
" 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
Shame
Succeed
Politics
" I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war. "
Michael Ignatieff
War
Day
Happened
" 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
Unique
Result
Law
" 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
" 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
" 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
Kind
Mean
Only
" 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
Crazy
Think
Me
" '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
" 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
Test
Place
United Nations
" 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
" I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. "
Michael Ignatieff
Patriotism
Nationalism
Between
" 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
Very
Who
English
" 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
Ugly
Business
Life
" Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted. "
Michael Ignatieff
Feeling
Patriotism
Strong
" The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty. "
Michael Ignatieff
Liberal
State
Ultimate
" 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
Story
History
Imagination
" 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? "
Michael Ignatieff
Scottish
Assume
Feel