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

Michael Ignatieff

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" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

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

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

" 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

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

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

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

" 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

" 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

" I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. "

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

" Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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'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

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

Michael Ignatieff

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

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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

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

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

" There are no techniques in politics. "

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

" 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