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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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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
Come
Interested
Time
Policy
Question
Interest
Exclusively
Whether
Policies
Idea
Sake
May
Politician
Ideas
Intellectual
More quotes by 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
It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
Michael Ignatieff
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
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
You're never really out of politics.
Michael Ignatieff
Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
Michael Ignatieff
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
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
Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.
Michael Ignatieff
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
Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
Michael Ignatieff
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
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
They [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.
Michael Ignatieff
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
There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
Michael Ignatieff
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
...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
Michael Ignatieff
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
Canadians want a country. They don't want a community of communities. I'm committed to the national unity of the country.
Michael Ignatieff
