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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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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
Exercise
Soldiers
Straddling
Country
Special
Empires
Spooks
Think
Call
Shock
Legions
Thinking
Force
Soldier
Legion
Like
War
Forces
Imperialism
Else
Terror
Globe
America
Entire
Globes
May
Americans
Empire

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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.
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There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
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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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You're never really out of politics.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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.
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There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
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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Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
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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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Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
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.
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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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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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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