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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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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
Country
Canadians
Communities
Unity
Committed
Communication
National
Community

More quotes by 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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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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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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There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
Michael Ignatieff
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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.
Michael Ignatieff
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No kid graduating in a political science class in Canada should not understand what's happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It's the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies.
Michael Ignatieff
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It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
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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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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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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You're never really out of politics.
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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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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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 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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How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
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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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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Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
Michael Ignatieff