Michael Ignatieff quotes - page 2

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror. (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. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual? View quote
Michael Ignatieff
Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
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. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
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. View quote
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. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves. (Michael Ignatieff)
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. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
All war aims for impunity. View quote
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. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
There's intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
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. View quote
Michael Ignatieff
Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill. View quote
Michael Ignatieff