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It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.

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
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Causes
Believe
Good
People

More quotes by 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.
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Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.
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One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.
Michael Ignatieff
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You're never really out of politics.
Michael Ignatieff
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Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
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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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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...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
Michael Ignatieff
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Canadians want a country. They don't want a community of communities. I'm committed to the national unity of the country.
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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One of the biggest divides in Canada - I said it in 2006, and I said it right through my political career - is urban-rural. Lots of parts of this country feel entirely left behind. And they're mobilized by, you know, the gun control issue.
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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The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.
Michael Ignatieff
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There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
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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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 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
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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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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