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" I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language. "
Michael Ignatieff
Heart
Liberal
Language
Related Quotes:
" 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
" 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
People
Over
Communism
" 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
" What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S. "
Michael Ignatieff
Political
Home
Common Sense
" 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
" 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. "
Michael Ignatieff
Politics
Thinking
Ideas
" It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves. "
Michael Ignatieff
Believe
Good
People
" There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers. "
Michael Ignatieff
Financial
Soldiers
Real
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Michael Ignatieff
Bible
Better
Years
" 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. "
Michael Ignatieff
Always
Politics
Republic
" 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
" 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
" '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
" 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
" 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. "
Michael Ignatieff
Bridges
Limits
Power
" 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
Politics
People
Life
" 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
" 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
Us
" The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control. "
Michael Ignatieff
War
Lawyers
Future
" America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order. "
Michael Ignatieff
Realism
Creating
Country
" America owed its military renaissance in the 1980s and 1990s to Vietnam. Veterans like Norman Schwartzkopf, Colin Powell, Alfred Grey, Charles Krulak, and Wesley Clark returned home angry and ashamed at their defeat and rebuilt all-volunteer, professional armed forces from the ground up. "
Michael Ignatieff
America
Angry
Grey
" Loving a country is an act of the imagination. "
Michael Ignatieff
Country
Loving
Imagination
" 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
Trouble
Cry
Game
" 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
" 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
" 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 think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke. "
Michael Ignatieff
Peace
Think
Bosnia