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
believed call dirty good modern name problem public shocking thinkers worry
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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Desert Storm was seen by the military establishment and by some politicians as avenging Vietnam, but it left behind dangerous illusions. The victory was so decisive, and information about it so carefully managed, that the American public was never clearly informed that it was purchased at the price of approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives.
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The legitimacy of coercive acts in a democracy arises from the process by which they are justified and by the degree to which we regard decisions as rational. If the justifications proceed properly, through recognized public institutions, and if they make sense to us, they are legitimate.
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You can't spend your whole life teaching people about public service without finally thinking that you should put your money where your mouth is.
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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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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'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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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.
against none run running vision
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.