Quotes from Michael Ignatieff

There are no techniques in politics.

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

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.

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

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

Liberal democracy has endured because its institutions are designed for handling morally hazardous forms of coercive power. It puts the question of how far government should go to the cross fire of adversarial review.

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.

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

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

An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician's interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea's time has come.

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.