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
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I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa, you try to make every barbecue, festival, parade and charity run, but sometimes you feel pulled in 14 directions at once.
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I had the vocation for politics. What I didn't have was any aptitude for political combat. I took the attacks personally, which is a great mistake. It's never personal: It's just business. It was ever thus.
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I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.
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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.
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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.
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I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau.
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For someone like me who, as a kid, walked to school muttering little political speeches to myself, it was irresistible to finally get a chance at political life for real. When the people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore elected me their MP, it changed me forever.
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I don't support the Americans any more and I, in many ways, would hope they would leave sooner rather than later. But I do support Iraqi democracy.
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I don't want to be someone sitting in my rocking chair at the end saying, 'Well, I passed.' My mum used to say life isn't for sissies.
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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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Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.
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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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The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions-and Iraq may be one of them-when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror,
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There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don't yet have states. They're inside someone else's state and they want a state of their own.