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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
May
Politician
Ideas
Intellectual
Come
Interested
Time
Policy
Question
Interest
Exclusively
Whether
Policies
Idea
Sake
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Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
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You're never really out of politics.
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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?
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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.
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...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
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Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.
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Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
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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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Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.
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It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
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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.
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They [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
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There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
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