Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff, PCis a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 May 1947
CountryCanada
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Ultimate authority in a global system remains with sovereigns. Governments will not have it any other way: politicians face instant rejection from their electorate if they allow transnational authorities to dictate terms.
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For someone like me who, as a kid, walked to school muttering little political speeches to myself, it was irresistible to finally get a chance at political life for real. When the people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore elected me their MP, it changed me forever.
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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.
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The core of human rights work is naming and shaming those who commit abuses, and pressuring governments to put the screws to abusing states. As a result, human rights conventions are unique among international law instruments in depending for their enforcement mostly on the activism of a global civil society movement.
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I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau.
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If you say that we're going to intervene to stop ethnic cleansing but we're only going to do it at 15,000 feet, you can't actually do it.
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I don't think you'll have to wait long. I'm not in a Hamlet-like state of indecision.
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Not even a superpower can hold onto its economic sovereignty if it fails to get its fiscal house in order, and no one needs a well-regulated international economic order more than the United States.
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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.
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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.
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I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.
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Lincoln was not an intellectual, but no one in 200 years understood the language of the King James Bible or learned Blackstone's Laws of England, or Cicero, or the language of the Founding Fathers, better than he did.
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I am an English-speaking Canadian, but my entire family - Russian exiles and the Canadians they married - is buried in Quebec, and if Quebec were to separate, I would feel I had been cut in two.
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My chief concern about the way we're going is that new technology, precision weapons technology, appears to be giving us a new moral alibi.