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You're never really out of politics.

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
Politics
Really
Never

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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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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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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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There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
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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's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.
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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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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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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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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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Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
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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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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 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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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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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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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.
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There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.
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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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