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
best credit game left people played politics predators respect toward worst
I may have come into politics with an unacknowledged condescension toward the game and the people who played it, but I left with more respect for politicians than when I went in. The worst of them - the careerists and predators - you find in all professions. The best of them were a credit to democracy.
people politics
If the only people who can succeed in politics are people who go in at 25, that'd be too bad. That'd be a shame.
politics
I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau.
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The core of human rights work is naming and shaming those who commit abuses, and pressuring governments to put the screws to abusing states. As a result, human rights conventions are unique among international law instruments in depending for their enforcement mostly on the activism of a global civil society movement.
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I remember the intellectual fashion for American decline in the 1970s. There was the stunning defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam , rioting in Detroit and Newark that suggested the social fabric was coming apart, talk of Rust Belt America unable to compete with the Japanese, and a sense the Russian bear was on the march.
america bear belt coming compete decline defeat detroit fabric fashion newark remember russian rust social stunning suggested talk unable vietnam
I remember the intellectual fashion for American decline in the 1970s, ... There was the stunning defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam , rioting in Detroit and Newark that suggested the social fabric was coming apart, talk of Rust Belt America unable to compete with the Japanese, and a sense the Russian bear was on the march.
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I am an English-speaking Canadian, but my entire family - Russian exiles and the Canadians they married - is buried in Quebec, and if Quebec were to separate, I would feel I had been cut in two.
politics
In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness. It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean.
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If you say that we're going to intervene to stop ethnic cleansing but we're only going to do it at 15,000 feet, you can't actually do it.
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In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.
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I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.
political society
A society is not a market. It is a political community.
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Not even a superpower can hold onto its economic sovereignty if it fails to get its fiscal house in order, and no one needs a well-regulated international economic order more than the United States.
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It turns out that there is nothing so 'ex' as an ex-politician, especially a defeated one. Your phone goes dead.