Michael Ignatieff Quotes

Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.

~ Michael Ignatieff

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

~ 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

An ethnic minority can live in peace with an ethnic majority as long as the majority does not use its preponderance to turn the institutions of the state into an instrument of ethnic favoritism or ethnic justice.

~ Michael Ignatieff

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

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

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

~ Michael Ignatieff

Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

~ Michael Ignatieff

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

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

~ Michael Ignatieff

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

~ 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

Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.

~ Michael Ignatieff

I went into politics thinking that, if I made arguments in good faith, I'd get a hearing. It's a reasonable assumption, but it's wrong. In five and a half years in politics up north, no one really bothered to criticize my ideas, such as they were. It was never my message that was the issue. It was always the messenger.

~ Michael Ignatieff

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

~ Michael Ignatieff

Loving a country is an act of the imagination.

~ Michael Ignatieff

Politics is a tough game. But would I change places with a trauma nurse in an emergency ward on a busy Saturday night? No way. There are lots of jobs in the world that are tougher than politics. And politicians and people who've done it need to remember that.

~ Michael Ignatieff

Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes.

~ Michael Ignatieff

When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.

~ Michael Ignatieff