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
admired czech exactly knew mario mexico politics
I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.
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There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.
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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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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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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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What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.
war
We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.
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We have got to plant our standard firmly on the centre-left of Canadian politics.
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I'd be wary of writing this country off. There are some scary and ugly things about it, but it remains a turbulently, explosively innovative place.
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I am fighting to revive faith, not just in the Liberal party, but in politics itself. I'm a devoted Liberal, I've been one all my life. That's why I'm in the fight to renew the party I love. All my life has been inspired by Canada, and now it's my turn to try and inspire my fellow Canadians.
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None of us, none of us are going to run against each other. All of us are running against Stephen Harper's vision of Canada.
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Politics isn't a reality show or a gong show. It's not show business for ugly people. It's the arena where we define our common life in a rough and ready contest that has winners and losers.
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Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading.
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Politics is intensely physical: your hands touch, clasp and hold, and your eyes are always reaching for contact. None of this came naturally to me. I'd always put my trust in words and let the words do the work, but in politics, the real message is physical.