Michael Ignatieff Short Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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