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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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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
Without
Told
Street
Way
Wasn
Praise
Always
Saying
Failure
People
Teach
Students
Toronto
Politics
Streets
Hello
Wrong
Walk
Kick
Experience
Coming
Kicks
Someone
Walks
Mostly

More quotes by 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.
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You're never really out of politics.
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It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
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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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Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
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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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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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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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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.
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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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There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
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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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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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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 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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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.
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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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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