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Michael Ignatieff Quotes

Michael Grant Ignatieff is 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. He is currently rector and President of Central European University.

While living in the United Kingdom from 1978 to 2000, Ignatieff became well known as a television and radio broadcaster and as an editorial columnist for The Observer. His documentary series Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism aired on BBC in 1993, and won a Canadian Gemini Award. His book of the same name, based on the series, won the Gordon Montador Award for Best Canadian Book on Social Issues and the University of Toronto's Lionel Gelber Prize. His memoir, The Russian Album, won Canada's Governor General's Literary Award and the British Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Prize in 1988. His novel, Scar Tissue, was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994. In 2000, he delivered the Massey Lectures, entitled The Rights Revolution, which was released in print later that year.

In the 2006 federal election, Ignatieff was elected to the House of Commons as the Member of Parliament for Etobicoke—Lakeshore. That same year, he ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party, ultimately losing to Stéphane Dion. He served as the party's deputy leader under Dion. After Dion's resignation in the wake of the 2008 election, Ignatieff served as interim leader from December 2008 until he was elected leader at the party's May 2009 convention. In the 2011 federal election, Ignatieff lost his own seat in the Liberal Party's worst showing in its history. Winning only 34 seats, the party placed a distant third behind the Conservatives and NDP, and thus lost its position as the Official Opposition. On May 3, 2011, Ignatieff announced that he would resign as leader of the Liberal Party, pending the selection of an interim leader, which became effective May 25, 2011.

Following his electoral defeat, Ignatieff taught at the University of Toronto. In 2013, he returned to the Harvard Kennedy School part-time, splitting his time between Harvard and Toronto. On July 1, 2014, he returned to Harvard full-time. In 2016, he left Harvard to become president and rector of the Central European University in Budapest. He continues to publish articles and essays on international affairs as well as Canadian politics.

In December 2016, Ignatieff was named a Member of the Order of Canada.



Wikipedia  

✵ 12. May 1947
Michael Ignatieff photo

Works

Scar Tissue
Scar Tissue
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff: 21   quotes 0   likes

Famous Michael Ignatieff Quotes

“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 book Scar Tissue

Source: Scar Tissue

“The [Afghans] understand the difficult truth that their best hope of freedom lies in a temporary experience of imperial rule.”

Michael Ignatieff

"Nation Building Lite", New York Times Magazine (July 2002)

“Ever since I entered Parliament in January, people have been asking me: Why have you gone into politics? As in: “Are you nuts?” No, I’m not nuts. This is my country, after all.”

Michael Ignatieff

Canada in the World Speech, University of Ottawa (30 March 2006)

“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

New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004

“We are living a moment of truth in Iraq, a moment in which we have to look fair and square at disagreeable realities, in which we have to look at ourselves. The pictures from Abu Ghraib prison are a kind of mirror in which we have to look at ourselves and ask: what kind of people did this? How did this become possible? Could I have done a thing like this to those people?”

Michael Ignatieff

From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004

“There is only one thing we can do about this: live the way we are supposed to live, as our Constitution commands us to, with dignity and respect for all. Being an American is not easy. It is hard. We are required to keep some serious promises. We are judged by a high standard, one we crafted for ourselves in the founding documents of the republic, the ones that talk about the equality of all people, the ones that tell us that government is of the people, by the people and for the people. We need to live by this, at home and abroad, and it is just about the only thing we can do to face the hatred of those who want to destroy us. Our best defense is to stay true to who we are. Our best defense is to refuse to live in fear, of them, of ourselves, of anyone.”

Michael Ignatieff

From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004

Michael Ignatieff Quotes about the trip

“As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners. The only way any of us can improve our grasp of reality is to confront the world every day and learn, mostly from our mistakes, what works and what doesn’t. Yet even lengthy experience can fail us in life and in politics. Experience can imprison decision-makers in worn-out solutions while blinding them to the untried remedy that does the trick.”

Michael Ignatieff

Getting Iraq Wrong http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/05/magazine/05iraq-t.html?ei=5070&en=1c14886ef4740931&ex=1187409600&emc=eta1&pagewanted=print&_r=0, The New York Times, August 5, 2007.

“Some voices are calling on America to circle the wagons. Some are even saying that our enemies do worse, so we should respond in kind. The problem here is that this is America. This is a constitutional republic based on the rule of law and equal respect for all persons. We can’t pretend that we can bend the rules any which way.”

Michael Ignatieff

From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004

“The difference between us and terrorists is supposed to be that we play by these rules, even if they don't. No, I haven't forgotten Hiroshima and My Lai. The American way of war has often been brutal, but at least our warriors are supposed to fight with honor and can be punished if they don't. There is no warrior's honor among terrorists.”

Michael Ignatieff

New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004

Michael Ignatieff Quotes

“Here's what we shouldn't do. We shouldn't import failed criminal justice policies from the United States. Mega prisons and mandatory minimums have failed in the United States, we've got to learn from the failure of the American criminal justice policy. Get tough on guns, invest in crime prevention and invest in victim services”

Michael Ignatieff

English Language Leaders' Debate, April 12, 2011, http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20110413/main-election-110413/20110413?s_name=election2011

Justice , Failure , Learning

“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

"Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?", New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005

Democracy

“As Interim Leader of the Liberal Party of Canada.”

Michael Ignatieff

From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004

“I’m in politics to speak up for a Canada that takes risks, that stands up for what’s right. A Canada that leads.”

Michael Ignatieff

Canada in the World Speech, University of Ottawa (30 March 2006)

“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 political goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence…”

Michael Ignatieff

"The Lesser Evil" (Penquin, 2004) Pg. 144

Exercises

“I believe in Canadians. I believe in you. As I said at the beginning, we are a serious people.”

Michael Ignatieff

Canada in the World Speech, University of Ottawa (30 March 2006)

People

“Coalition if necessary, but not necessarily a coalition.”

Michael Ignatieff

In response to his position on the Coalition Accord signed between the Liberal Party, New Democratic Party and Bloc Quebecois parties, by his predecessor Stephane Dion.
From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004

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

Michael Ignatieff

New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004

War , Evil

“We do need to ask ourselves, as a society, as a free people, how we came to this pass. Those soldiers were acting in the name of America, and they disgraced its name. We have to ask who authorized them to do so. Who should take responsibility here? We need answers to these questions, and we need to take responsibility as citizens that we get answers, and that accountability is established, right up the chain of command if need be, so that we do not go here again as a country.”

Michael Ignatieff

From "Living Fearlessly in a Fearless World" Ignatieff Commencement Address to Whitman College (USA), 2004

People , Question , Country

“The dilemmas here are best illustrated by looking closely at pre-emptive war. It is a lesser evil because, according to our traditional understanding of war, the only justified resort to war is a response to actual aggression. But those standards are outdated. They were conceived for wars against states and their armies, not for wars against terrorists and suicide bombers. Against this kind of enemy, everyone can see that instead of waiting for terrorists to hit us, it makes sense to get our retaliation in first.”

Michael Ignatieff

New York Times magazine op-ed piece, May 2, 2004

War , Understanding , Sense , Suicide

“Until George W. Bush, no American president -- not even Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson -- actually risked his presidency on the premise that Jefferson might be right. But this gambler from Texas has bet his place in history on the proposition, as he stated in a speech in March, that decades of American presidents' excusing and accommodating tyranny, in the pursuit of stability in the Middle East inflamed the hatred of the fanatics who piloted the planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11. If democracy plants itself in Iraq and spreads throughout the Middle East, Bush will be remembered as a plain-speaking visionary.”

Michael Ignatieff

"Who Are Americans to Think That Freedom Is Theirs to Spread?", New York Times Magazine, June 26, 2005

Democracy , History

“Moral globalisation is best understood not as a tide of convergence in which we are swept together into a single modernity, but instead as a site of struggle over whether, and to what extent, the cash nexus can be made to serve moral imperatives of equity and justice and which civilisational model – Chinese, American, or some other rival’s – will define the order of the twenty-first century.”

Michael Ignatieff

The Ordinary Virtues, p. 16

Justice

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