Quote

You're never really out of politics.

Michael Ignatieff

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Never
Politics
Really

More quotes by Michael Ignatieff

Image
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
Image
Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.
Michael Ignatieff
Image
How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?
Michael Ignatieff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
Michael Ignatieff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
Michael Ignatieff
Image
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
Image
Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.
Michael Ignatieff
Image
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.
Michael Ignatieff
Image
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
Image
Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
Michael Ignatieff
Image
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
Image
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
Image
...our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.
Michael Ignatieff
Image
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