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" 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. "

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" I may have come into politics with an unacknowledged condescension toward the game and the people who played it, but I left with more respect for politicians than when I went in. The worst of them - the careerists and predators - you find in all professions. The best of them were a credit to democracy. "

Michael Ignatieff

Politics

Respect

Best

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

" When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority. "

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

" 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. "

" Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces. "

" Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process. "

" 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. "

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

" The legitimacy of coercive acts in a democracy arises from the process by which they are justified and by the degree to which we regard decisions as rational. If the justifications proceed properly, through recognized public institutions, and if they make sense to us, they are legitimate. "

Michael Ignatieff

Process

Decisions

" I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. "

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

Politics

Words

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

" 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. "

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

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

" After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what? "

" The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror. "

" 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

Democracy

" What we want is to become masters in our own house. "

" It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves. "

" 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

" 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. "

" There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" All the best reasons for going into politics never really change: the desire for glory and fame and the chance to do something that really matters, that will make life better for a lot of people. "

" Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics. "

" 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. "