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" Desert Storm was seen by the military establishment and by some politicians as avenging Vietnam, but it left behind dangerous illusions. The victory was so decisive, and information about it so carefully managed, that the American public was never clearly informed that it was purchased at the price of approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives. "

Michael Ignatieff

Price

Victory

Storm

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

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

" I went into politics thinking that, if I made arguments in good faith, I'd get a hearing. It's a reasonable assumption, but it's wrong. In five and a half years in politics up north, no one really bothered to criticize my ideas, such as they were. It was never my message that was the issue. It was always the messenger. "

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

" 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 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. "

" Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty. "

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" 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. "

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

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

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

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

" 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. "

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" 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. "

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" 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. "

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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. "

" 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. "