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" There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism. "

Michael Ignatieff

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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. "

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" 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

" 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. "

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

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

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" 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. "

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

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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 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. "

Michael Ignatieff

" Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong. "

" I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. "

Michael Ignatieff

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

Michael Ignatieff

" Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, 'Those who can, do, those who can't, teach,' forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books. "

Michael Ignatieff

" I would rather be remembered by a song than by a victory. "

Alexander Smith

" 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 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

" 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

" 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

" I have long believed that sacrifice is the pinnacle of patriotism. "

" 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

" 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

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

Michael Ignatieff

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

Michael Ignatieff

" There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries. "

Michael Ignatieff

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

Michael Ignatieff

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

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