Quotes from Michael Ignatieff

I teach students that what people say about failure in politics is mostly wrong. People always told me, 'They'll praise you on your way up and kick you on your way down.' That wasn't my experience. I can't walk down the street in Toronto without someone coming up and saying hello.

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.

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

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

'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.

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

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.

our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.

It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.

I admit I must have been impossible to live with. It was the self-righteousness of the grieving--my idea that I would betray him if I carried on as before, if I went through the motions of living--that must have driven my family apart from me. I still do not understand those instincts that lead you to flee the ones who want to help you, that lead you to take revenge upon them for a sorrow that is not their fault.

Because we remain a land of hope and opportunity, and new Canadians see in our unfinished destiny an image of their own unfinished destines.

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

She painted because she loved to paint. She never exhibited. She had no career, no ambitions for her work except that it be good, and she didn't care what we thought of it.

To imagine Canada as a citizen requires that you enter into he mind of someone who does not believe what you believe or share what matters to you.

Fascism is not just any politics you don't like. Fascism is the explicit use of political violence, hitting people, killing people, knocking people over, invading an assembly with armed thugs.

I had a feeling of shame about my grief, as if I was making false amends for the bitterness I felt towards him when he was alive.

Once you begin throwing your life away, you have to go through it until the compulsion to destroy has run its course.

An ethnic minority can live in peace with an ethnic majority as long as the majority does not use its preponderance to turn the institutions of the state into an instrument of ethnic favoritism or ethnic justice.

Intolerance is a form of divided consciousness in which abstract, conceptual, ideological hatred vanquishes concrete, real and individual moments of identification.

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

en política las explicaciones siempre llegan demasiado tarde. Nunca debes dar explicaciones ni quejarte. Como mucho, si eres afortunado, lograrás vengarte.

No human difference matters much until it becomes a privilege, until it becomes the basis for oppression. Power is the vector that turns minor into major.

Nationalism is a distorting mirror in which believers see their simple ethnic, religious, or territorial attributes transformed into glorious attributes and qualities.