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" The war waged against terror since September 11 puts a strain on democracy itself, because it is mostly waged in secret, using means that are at the edge of both law and morality. Yet democracies have shown themselves capable of keeping the secret exercise of power under control. "

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" 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

" 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. "

" I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war. "

" Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news. "

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

" Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I teach students that what people say about failure in politics is mostly wrong. People always told me, 'They'll praise you on your way up and kick you on your way down.' That wasn't my experience. I can't walk down the street in Toronto without someone coming up and saying hello. "

" 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

" 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. "

" What we want is to become masters in our own house. "

" 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. "

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

" I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language. "

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

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

" 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

Politics

Words

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "