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

Michael Ignatieff Quotes

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

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

— 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 cant, teach, forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.

— Michael Ignatieff

Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.

— Michael Ignatieff

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

— Michael Ignatieff

Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument – that our future is being shaped far away ‘at the ends of the earth’ – makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading.

— 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

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

— 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

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

— 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

Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.

— Michael Ignatieff

The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Strong

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

— 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

All war aims for impunity.

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

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

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

— Michael Ignatieff

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