Best quotes by Michael Ignatieff on Politics

Checkout quotes by Michael Ignatieff on Politics

• ‟ Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis.

  - 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.

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

• ‟ When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

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

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

• ‟ All the best reasons for going into politics never really change: the desire for glory and fame and the chance to do something that really matters, that will make life better for a lot of people.

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

• ‟ 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.

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

• ‟ I went into politics thinking that, if I made arguments in good faith, I'd get a hearing. It's a reasonable assumption, but it's wrong. In five and a half years in politics up north, no one really bothered to criticize my ideas, such as they were. It was never my message that was the issue. It was always the messenger.

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

• ‟ I may have come into politics with an unacknowledged condescension toward the game and the people who played it, but I left with more respect for politicians than when I went in. The worst of them - the careerists and predators - you find in all professions. The best of them were a credit to democracy.

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

• ‟ I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

• ‟ In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness. It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean.

  - Michael Ignatieff
  

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

  - Michael Ignatieff