Michael Ignatieff Quotes (34 Quotes)

If you say that we're going to intervene to stop ethnic cleansing but we're only going to do it at 15,000 feet, you can't actually do it.

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.

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

What we want is to become masters in our own house.

There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

Nationalism could almost be defined as intense national feeling for a country that does not yet exist, or for someone else's country.

I respect the work Mr. Harper has done to learn French, to make a 'gesture' toward Quebec. My criticism of him is that he's making promises I don't think he can keep.

How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?

I don't think you'll have to wait long. I'm not in a Hamlet-like state of indecision.

Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

I don't support the Americans any more and I, in many ways, would hope they would leave sooner rather than later. But I do support Iraqi democracy.

All war aims for impunity.

a theater of displacement, in which political energies that might otherwise have been expended in defending multiethnic society at home were directed instead at defending mythic multiculturalism far away. Bosnia became the latest bel espoir of a generation that had tried ecology, socialism, and civil rights only to watch all these lose their romantic momentum.

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.

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.

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.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

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.

I spent five years in the United States. I admire and respect American institutions.

It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.

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.

There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.

We have to invest in Saskatchewan and . . . listen to Saskatchewan . . . and learn from Saskatchewan.

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.

Canadians want a country. They don't want a community of communities. I'm committed to the national unity of the country.

I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.

If you get the access to see history happen, do you understand the history when it does happen And the answer to that question is no, you don't.

I remember the intellectual fashion for American decline in the 1970s. There was the stunning defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam , rioting in Detroit and Newark that suggested the social fabric was coming apart, talk of Rust Belt America unable to compete with the Japanese, and a sense the Russian bear was on the march.

There's a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it's all about, so they spin 24 hours a day and that's a problem.

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.

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.

If we are a national institution, we must as a party reunite in rural and agricultural Canada. We can't be a national institution if we're only going for votes in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax.

There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.