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

Michael Ignatieff

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted. "

Michael Ignatieff

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

Michael Ignatieff

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" It turns out that there is nothing so 'ex' as an ex-politician, especially a defeated one. Your phone goes dead. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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

" 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

" I'm a Canadian. I've always been a Canadian. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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.' "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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

" 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

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

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

" Desert Storm was seen by the military establishment and by some politicians as avenging Vietnam, but it left behind dangerous illusions. The victory was so decisive, and information about it so carefully managed, that the American public was never clearly informed that it was purchased at the price of approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives. "

Michael Ignatieff

" There are no techniques in politics. "

Michael Ignatieff