Michael Ignatieff
Michael Ignatieff
Michael Grant Ignatieff, PCis a Canadian author, academic and former politician. He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011. Known for his work as a historian, Ignatieff has held senior academic posts at the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Harvard and Toronto...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth12 May 1947
CountryCanada
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The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.
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I respect the work Mr. Harper has done to learn French, to make a 'gesture' toward Quebec. My criticism of him is that he's making promises I don't think he can keep.
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Nationalism could almost be defined as intense national feeling for a country that does not yet exist, or for someone else's country.
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Lincoln was not an intellectual, but no one in 200 years understood the language of the King James Bible or learned Blackstone's Laws of England, or Cicero, or the language of the Founding Fathers, better than he did.
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My chief concern about the way we're going is that new technology, precision weapons technology, appears to be giving us a new moral alibi.
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Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.
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I'd be wary of writing this country off. There are some scary and ugly things about it, but it remains a turbulently, explosively innovative place.
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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.
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I am fighting to revive faith, not just in the Liberal party, but in politics itself. I'm a devoted Liberal, I've been one all my life. That's why I'm in the fight to renew the party I love. All my life has been inspired by Canada, and now it's my turn to try and inspire my fellow Canadians.
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Free societies, which allow differences to speak and be heard, and live by intermarriage, commerce, and free migration, and democratic societies, which convert enemies into adversaries and reconcile differences without resort to violence, are societies in which the genocidal temptation is unlikely and even inconceivable.
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I don't think you'll have to wait long. I'm not in a Hamlet-like state of indecision.
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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.
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If we are a national institution, we must as a party reunite in rural and agricultural Canada. We can't be a national institution if we're only going for votes in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax.
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Politics isn't a reality show or a gong show. It's not show business for ugly people. It's the arena where we define our common life in a rough and ready contest that has winners and losers.