A biography for Michael Ignatieffhasn’t been written yet.
“A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.”
“We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.”
“All war aims for impunity.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I'm a Canadian. I've always been a Canadian.”
“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.”
“There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.”
“Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.”
“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.”
“Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.”
“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.”
“It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.”
“I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.”
“Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit.”
“I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.”
“There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.”
“I can't think of this country without Quebec. Je parle francais. And when I think about being a Canadian, speaking French is part of it.”
“The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.”
“Secessionists, whether in Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec or anywhere else, invariably assume that a person must either be Scottish or British, Catalan or Spanish, Quebecois or Canadian. What about those who feel they are both?”