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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What's distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn't care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn't worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call 'the problem of dirty hands.'
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A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.
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Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.
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Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.
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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.
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The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.
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We're going out to rescue people who are being slaughtered or massacred, but we're going to do it at zero personal cost to ourselves.
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I spent five years in the United States. I admire and respect American institutions.
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Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit.
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Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that only those who are born in a place or who adopt its citizenship can hope to understand.
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I've always thought Anne-Marie Slaughter would make a fantastic United States Senator or something. She's a real intellectual, but she's got enormous communicative skills and she's got government experience. The thing that drives me slightly crazy is the way we think about intellectuals as wooly, hopeless, arrogant, self-deceived, incapable.
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We have to invest in Saskatchewan and . . . listen to Saskatchewan . . . and learn from Saskatchewan.
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My chief concern about the way we're going is that new technology, precision weapons technology, appears to be giving us a new moral alibi.
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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.