Michael Ignatieff Quotes

28 Sourced Quotes

We are living a moment of truth in Iraq, a moment in which we have to look fair and square at disagreeable realities, in which we have to look at ourselves. The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison are a kind of mirror in which we have to look at ourselves and ask: what kind of people did this? How did this become possible? Could I have done a thing like this to those people?

Michael Ignatieff
Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, Those who can, do, those who can't, teach, forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.

Michael Ignatieff
Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.

Michael Ignatieff
An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician's interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea's time has come,

Michael Ignatieff
The medium's gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.

Michael Ignatieff
We need words to keep us human. Being human is like playing an instrument. It takes practice.

Michael Ignatieff
A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders.

Michael Ignatieff
Until George W. Bush, no American president — not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson — actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents' excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11. If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary.

Michael Ignatieff
It was Reagan who began the realignment of American politics, making the Republicans into internationalist Jeffersonians with his speech in London at the Palace of Westminster in 1982, which led to the creation of the National Endowment for Democracy and the emergence of democracy promotion as a central goal of United States foreign policy.

Michael Ignatieff
Our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.

Michael Ignatieff
Here's what we shouldn't do. We shouldn't import failed criminal justice policies from the United States. Mega prisons and mandatory minimums have failed in the United States, we've got to learn from the failure of the American criminal justice policy. Get tough on guns, invest in crime prevention and invest in victim services

Michael Ignatieff
Ever since I entered Parliament in January, people have been asking me: Why have you gone into politics? As in: Are you nuts? No, I'm not nuts. This is my country, after all.

Michael Ignatieff
The dilemmas here are best illustrated by looking closely at pre-emptive war. It is a lesser evil because, according to our traditional understanding of war, the only justified resort to war is a response to actual aggression. But those standards are outdated. They were conceived for wars against states and their armies, not for wars against terrorists and suicide bombers. Against this kind of enemy, everyone can see that instead of waiting for terrorists to hit us, it makes sense to get our retaliation in first.

Michael Ignatieff
As a former denizen of Harvard, I've had to learn that a sense of reality doesn't always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what's what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn't. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.

Michael Ignatieff
Living fearlessly is not the same thing as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.

Michael Ignatieff
Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

Michael Ignatieff
Most of us no longer watch television; we graze, zapping back and forth between channels whenever our boredom threshold is triggered. No one does any one thing at a time. A new culture has taken shape which caters for people with the attention span of a flea.

Michael Ignatieff
Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

Michael Ignatieff
To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.

Michael Ignatieff
To imagine Canada as a citizen requires that you enter into the mind of someone who does not believe what you believe or share what matters to you.

Michael Ignatieff
I believe in Canadians. I believe in you. As I said at the beginning, we are a serious people.

Michael Ignatieff
I'm in politics to speak up for a Canada that takes risks, that stands up for what's right. A Canada that leads.

Michael Ignatieff
The difference between us and terrorists is supposed to be that we play by these rules, even if they don't. No, I haven't forgotten Hiroshima and My Lai. The American way of war has often been brutal, but at least our warriors are supposed to fight with honor and can be punished if they don't. There is no warrior's honor among terrorists.

Michael Ignatieff
The [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.

Michael Ignatieff
We do need to ask ourselves, as a society, as a free people, how we came to this pass. Those soldiers were acting in the name of America, and they disgraced its name. We have to ask who authorized them to do so. Who should take responsibility here? We need answers to these questions, and we need to take responsibility as citizens that we get answers, and that accountability is established, right up the chain of command if need be, so that we do not go here again as a country.

Michael Ignatieff
America's entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don't like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America's legions of soldiers, spooks and special forces straddling the globe?

Michael Ignatieff
Some voices are calling on America to circle the wagons. Some are even saying that our enemies do worse, so we should respond in kind. The problem here is that this is America. This is a constitutional republic based on the rule of law and equal respect for all persons. We can't pretend that we can bend the rules any which way.
We made the rules for ourselves. We have to live by them.

Michael Ignatieff
The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible poltical goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence...

Michael Ignatieff