A biography for Michael Ignatieffhasn’t been written yet.
“Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.”
“Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review.”
“America is exceptional in combining standard great-power realism with extravagant idealism about the country's redemptive role in creating international order.”
“I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.”
“Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.”
“Politics is a tough game. But would I change places with a trauma nurse in an emergency ward on a busy Saturday night? No way. There are lots of jobs in the world that are tougher than politics. And politicians and people who've done it need to remember that.”
“It turns out that there is nothing so 'ex' as an ex-politician, especially a defeated one. Your phone goes dead.”
“'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.”
“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.”
“What we want is to become masters in our own house.”
“I've been both a journalist and a politician, and I can tell you it is more fun to ask the questions than have to answer them.”
“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.”
“Loving a country is an act of the imagination.”
“I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.”
“In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.”
“Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes.”
“An ethnic minority can live in peace with an ethnic majority as long as the majority does not use its preponderance to turn the institutions of the state into an instrument of ethnic favoritism or ethnic justice.”
“Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.”
“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.”
“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.”