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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
Imagined
Onto
Future
Wish
Political
Utopias
Form
Projected
Past
Utopia
Nostalgia

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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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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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Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.
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How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
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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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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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They [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.
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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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Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
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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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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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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 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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It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
Michael Ignatieff
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...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
Michael Ignatieff
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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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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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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.
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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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There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
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