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" 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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" A society is not a market. It is a political community. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke. "

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

" 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. "

" 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.' "

" I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. "

" Conservatives believe that international institutions such as the United Nations are anti-American and anti-Israeli cabals. Progressives do not like the economic medicine that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank force down the throats of developing countries. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

Techniques

Politics

" 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. "

" 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 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. "

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