Quotes from Michael Ignatieff

What we want is to become masters in our own house.

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.

Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading.

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

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.

I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.

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.

Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

I'm a Canadian. I've always been a Canadian.

It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.

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.

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

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

If you get the access to see history happen, do you understand the history when it does happen? And the answer to that question is no, you dont.

Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.

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.

Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.

Cynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.

You can't get back to power by defining your project in negative terms. But it helps to have somebody in office who represents the opposite of what you believe.

I've been both a journalist and a politician, and I can tell you it is more fun to ask the questions than have to answer them.

There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.

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.

Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces.