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" There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don't yet have states. They're inside someone else's state and they want a state of their own. "

Michael Ignatieff

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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

" 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

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

Michael Ignatieff

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

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

" 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. "

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

Michael Ignatieff

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

Michael Ignatieff

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

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

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

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

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

" 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'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

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

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

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

Michael Ignatieff

" I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. "

Michael Ignatieff

" 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