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

Michael Ignatieff

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" There are no techniques in politics. "

Michael Ignatieff

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

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" I had the vocation for politics. What I didn't have was any aptitude for political combat. I took the attacks personally, which is a great mistake. It's never personal: It's just business. It was ever thus. "

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

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

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

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

Michael Ignatieff

" '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

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

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

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician's interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea's time has come. "

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

" I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night. "

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

" There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading. "

Michael Ignatieff

" I've been both a journalist and a politician, and I can tell you it is more fun to ask the questions than have to answer them. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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