152 Quotes by Michael Ignatieff

Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.

I don't think you'll have to wait long. I'm not in a Hamlet-like state of indecision.

If we are a national institution, we must as a party reunite in rural and agricultural Canada. We can't be a national institution if we're only going for votes in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax.

What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak.

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.

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.

I respect the work Mr. Harper has done to learn French, to make a 'gesture' toward Quebec. My criticism of him is that he's making promises I don't think he can keep.

Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.

Nationalism could almost be defined as intense national feeling for a country that does not yet exist, or for someone else's country.