Quotes from Michael Ignatieff

To belong is to understand the tacit codes of the people you live with; it is to know that you will be understood without having to explain yourself.

Believers in liberal freedom should worry not whether their regime can prevail in competition with authoritarian ones, but whether they can prevail against their own forms of institutional entropy: elite capture, corruption, and inequality.

I don't want to be someone sitting in my rocking chair at the end saying, 'Well, I passed.' My mum used to say life isn't for sissies.

After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what?

I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.

I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.

Well, I'm an absolute fan of lacy lingerie. I want to make that perfectly clear.

There are lots of nations in the world or national peoples who don't yet have states. They're inside someone else's state and they want a state of their own.

The reason that the Croats want a state of their own is that they fear being cut into little pieces by the Serbs.

There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.

Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.

For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Cote d'Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.

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.

It turns out that there is nothing so 'ex' as an ex-politician, especially a defeated one. Your phone goes dead.

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.

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.

All war aims for impunity.

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions-and Iraq may be one of them-when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

How do you keep war accountable to the American people when war becomes invisible and virtual?

The Liberal Party of Canada has no monopoly on public service, we have no monopoly on virtue, and we have no monopoly on wisdom.

Secessionists, whether in Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec or anywhere else, invariably assume that a person must either be Scottish or British, Catalan or Spanish, Quebecois or Canadian. What about those who feel they are both?

I can't think of this country without Quebec. Je parle francais. And when I think about being a Canadian, speaking French is part of it.

There's a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it's all about, so they spin 24 hours a day and that's a problem.