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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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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
Form
Projected
Past
Utopia
Nostalgia
Imagined
Onto
Future
Wish
Political
Utopias

More quotes by 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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It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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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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
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You're never really out of politics.
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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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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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 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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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
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There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
Michael Ignatieff
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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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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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How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
Michael Ignatieff
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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.
Michael Ignatieff