Quotes by Michael Ignatieff

Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.

— Michael Ignatieff

Truth

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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.

— Michael Ignatieff

Life

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

All war aims for impunity.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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.

— Michael Ignatieff

Hope

Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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.

— Michael Ignatieff

Education

For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Cote d'Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.

— Michael Ignatieff

Love

I teach students that what people say about failure in politics is mostly wrong. People always told me, 'They'll praise you on your way up and kick you on your way down.' That wasn't my experience. I can't walk down the street in Toronto without someone coming up and saying hello.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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?

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

The war waged against terror since September 11 puts a strain on democracy itself, because it is mostly waged in secret, using means that are at the edge of both law and morality. Yet democracies have shown themselves capable of keeping the secret exercise of power under control.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak.

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Wisdom