152 Quotes by Michael Ignatieff

I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa, you try to make every barbecue, festival, parade and charity run, but sometimes you feel pulled in 14 directions at once.

I had the vocation for politics. What I didn't have was any aptitude for political combat. I took the attacks personally, which is a great mistake. It's never personal: It's just business. It was ever thus.

I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.

I may have come into politics with an unacknowledged condescension toward the game and the people who played it, but I left with more respect for politicians than when I went in. The worst of them - the careerists and predators - you find in all professions. The best of them were a credit to democracy.

If the only people who can succeed in politics are people who go in at 25, that'd be too bad. That'd be a shame.

I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau.

I remember the intellectual fashion for American decline in the 1970s. There was the stunning defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam , rioting in Detroit and Newark that suggested the social fabric was coming apart, talk of Rust Belt America unable to compete with the Japanese, and a sense the Russian bear was on the march.

I remember the intellectual fashion for American decline in the 1970s, ... There was the stunning defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam , rioting in Detroit and Newark that suggested the social fabric was coming apart, talk of Rust Belt America unable to compete with the Japanese, and a sense the Russian bear was on the march.

In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness. It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean.