60+ Michael Ignatieff Quotes On Education, Freedom And Freedom Of Speech

Michael Ignatieff is a Canadian politician, author, and academic. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 to 2011. He has held various academic positions, including director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Michael Ignatieff on education, leadership, love.

Top 10 Michael Ignatieff Quotes

1. Well, I'm an absolute fan of lacy lingerie. I want to make that perfectly clear.
2. There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.
3. Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.
7. Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.
8. Inequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.
9. Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.
10. The Liberal Party of Canada has no monopoly on public service, we have no monopoly on virtue, and we have no monopoly on wisdom.

Michael Ignatieff Short Quotes

• I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.
• What we want is to become masters in our own house.
• Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.
• Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.
• If I am not elected, I imagine that I will ask Harvard to let me back.
• We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.
• All war aims for impunity.
• Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.
• You're never really out of politics.

Michael Ignatieff Quotes About People

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

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

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

What really matters is getting new people in. The constitutional changes matter, but the thing that the party mustn't do is turn in on itself and think the thing we've got to do is fix our plumbing. The thing we've got to do is get new people in. — Michael Ignatieff

There are all kinds of different forms of public service, but there's no form of public service that can make more difference for more people than partisan political activity. — Michael Ignatieff

We must not lose sight of the fundamental issue of policy which is that people who come to the country on visa status must never be abused. — Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff Quotes About Feeling

One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's. — Michael Ignatieff

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

One of the biggest divides in Canada - I said it in 2006, and I said it right through my political career - is urban-rural. Lots of parts of this country feel entirely left behind. And they're mobilized by, you know, the gun control issue. — Michael Ignatieff

Michael Ignatieff Quotes About Real

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

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

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

Michael Ignatieff Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

You can't get back to power by defining your project in negative terms. But it helps to have somebody in office who represents the opposite of what you believe. — Michael Ignatieff

Liberals don't want any part of Canada left behind. I used to give speeches on and on and on about the fact that we don't want to have a country where you think, "my kids have got to move to the city if they're going to have any kind of future." We've been saying that, and we've not got through. — 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

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

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

No kid graduating in a political science class in Canada should not understand what's happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It's the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies. — Michael Ignatieff

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

The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it's all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation - the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope - more clearly. — Michael Ignatieff

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

I'm very struck by what you can do in a classroom. I've got 200 students. You don't do partisan politics in a classroom, that's not appropriate. But you want to give them a strong sense that these are the issues that matter. — 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

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

There are a lot of young Canadians who want to be politically active at their college or their university who can't go to the party convention, who can't take part in politics, because they're holding down a job to pay their tuition. These are kids who want to do public service, who want to get involved politically, but their financial situation is precarious. — 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

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

There's a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it's all about, so they spin 24 hours a day and that's a problem. — 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. — Michael Ignatieff

The party's got to see itself as being one public service organization in a very competitive field, all of whom are competing for the allegiance and commitment and brains of the next generation. They've got to be big enough to reach out to those groups and say "come on in." — Michael Ignatieff

Public service does not necessarily mean service in the House of Commons, and public service is not synonymous with partisan political activity. It comes in a thousand colours, but the common denominator is: it's not about me - it's about we. — Michael Ignatieff

The Conservatives hold rural places because they keep bombarding rural Canada with, "Liberals are a bunch of urban, metropolitan snobs who don't care about you and want to leave you dead by the roadside." We've simply got to go out and say, "they're lying to you about us. We actually care about you more than the other guys, and we're not going to pander to your prejudices - we're going to give hope to your kids." — Michael Ignatieff

We can't afford to waste people. We can't afford to have people think the game is over before it's begun. We've got to be saying to the Canadian people: you can't tax cut your way to a productive 21st-century economy. You can talk that talk, but it's not going to give you a productive 21st-century economy, because it will scythe apart the public goods that make prosperity possible. That's what we've got to say, and so we shall. — Michael Ignatieff

If you get the access to see history happen, do you understand the history when it does happen? And the answer to that question is no, you dont. — Michael Ignatieff

Life Lessons by Michael Ignatieff

1. Michael Ignatieff's work as a Canadian politician demonstrates the importance of staying true to your values and beliefs, even when it is difficult.
2. He also shows the importance of advocating for what you believe in and standing up for what is right.
3. Finally, his work highlights the importance of being an active and engaged citizen in order to make a difference in the world.