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" 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. "

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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

War

Lawyers

Future

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application. "

" 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. "

" If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim. "

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

" The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias. "

" Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Crazy

Think

" 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? "

" 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. "

" Secessionists, whether in Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec or anywhere else, invariably assume that a person must either be Scottish or British, Catalan or Spanish, Quebecois or Canadian. What about those who feel they are both? "

" 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. "

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

" I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

" 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. "