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

Michael Ignatieff

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" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual? "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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

" Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

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

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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

" Loving a country is an act of the imagination. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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? "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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