Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff, PCis a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 May 1947
CountryCanada
busy change emergency jobs lots nurse people places politics remember saturday tough tougher trauma
Politics is a tough game. But would I change places with a trauma nurse in an emergency ward on a busy Saturday night? No way. There are lots of jobs in the world that are tougher than politics. And politicians and people who've done it need to remember that.
actual enforce exempt franklin hook leadership legal nations norms nuremberg promoted setting since united universal
Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.
cross designed endured far fire forms government handling hazardous liberal morally power puts question
Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review.
country
Loving a country is an act of the imagination.
author banned blunt book books candor london outrage placed scandal stages time
'The Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time.
global mean national political politics reliable source
When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.
harry truman
Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.
bosnian happened historical huge war
I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.
bothered criticize faith five good half message politics reasonable thinking
I went into politics thinking that, if I made arguments in good faith, I'd get a hearing. It's a reasonable assumption, but it's wrong. In five and a half years in politics up north, no one really bothered to criticize my ideas, such as they were. It was never my message that was the issue. It was always the messenger.
almost canadian-politician country defined feeling intense national
Nationalism could almost be defined as intense national feeling for a country that does not yet exist, or for someone else's country.
founding james laws learned lincoln understood
Lincoln was not an intellectual, but no one in 200 years understood the language of the King James Bible or learned Blackstone's Laws of England, or Cicero, or the language of the Founding Fathers, better than he did.
criticism learn promises respect toward work
I respect the work Mr. Harper has done to learn French, to make a 'gesture' toward Quebec. My criticism of him is that he's making promises I don't think he can keep.
allow convert democratic enemies reconcile resort societies speak temptation unlikely
Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.
state wait
I don't think you'll have to wait long. I'm not in a Hamlet-like state of indecision.