Quote

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

Michael Ignatieff

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Michael Ignatieff
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: January 1
Historian
Journalist
Member Of The Canadian House Of Commons
Novelist
Philosopher
Politician
Researcher
University Teacher
Writer
City of Toronto
M.G. Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff
Stopped
Believed
Memory
Inside
Memories
Programmed
Forget
Afterlife
Cannot
Forgetting
Ever
Betray

More quotes by Michael Ignatieff

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How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
Michael Ignatieff
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There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
Michael Ignatieff
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I'm very struck by what you can do in a classroom. I've got 200 students. You don't do partisan politics in a classroom, that's not appropriate. But you want to give them a strong sense that these are the issues that matter.
Michael Ignatieff
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It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy.
Michael Ignatieff
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They [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.
Michael Ignatieff
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The party's got to see itself as being one public service organization in a very competitive field, all of whom are competing for the allegiance and commitment and brains of the next generation. They've got to be big enough to reach out to those groups and say come on in.
Michael Ignatieff
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Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.
Michael Ignatieff
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Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.
Michael Ignatieff
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Liberals don't want any part of Canada left behind. I used to give speeches on and on and on about the fact that we don't want to have a country where you think, my kids have got to move to the city if they're going to have any kind of future. We've been saying that, and we've not got through.
Michael Ignatieff
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We must not lose sight of the fundamental issue of policy which is that people who come to the country on visa status must never be abused.
Michael Ignatieff
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Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
Michael Ignatieff
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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
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The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it's all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation - the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope - more clearly.
Michael Ignatieff
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What really matters is getting new people in. The constitutional changes matter, but the thing that the party mustn't do is turn in on itself and think the thing we've got to do is fix our plumbing. The thing we've got to do is get new people in.
Michael Ignatieff
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There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
Michael Ignatieff
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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
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The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.
Michael Ignatieff
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America's entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don't like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America's legions of soldiers, spooks and special forces straddling the globe?
Michael Ignatieff
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You're never really out of politics.
Michael Ignatieff
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...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
Michael Ignatieff