This is an American institution, you would assume an American ambassador on post in a country would say, I got ta defend American institutions here... But somehow I think Ambassador David Cornstein in 2018 began to think,' Huh, this is a liberal institution, I'm closer to a conservative like Viktor Orban than I am to the ideals of this institution,' and what's disturbing about that, is that shouldn't be the issue.

Michael Ignatieff

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.

Michael Ignatieff

choices feelings life

A liberal society cannot be defended by herbivores. We need carnivores to save us, but we had better make sure the meat-eaters hunt only on our orders.

Michael Ignatieff

meat order needs

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

multicultural-society differences land

I'm very struck by what you can do in a classroom. I've got 200 students. You don't do partisan politics in a classroom, that's not appropriate. But you want to give them a strong sense that these are the issues that matter.

Michael Ignatieff

issues strong giving

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

Michael Ignatieff

canada virtue party

Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, Those who can, do, those who cant, teach, forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.

Michael Ignatieff

writing men book

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.

Michael Ignatieff

intellectual sake ideas

We can't afford to waste people. We can't afford to have people think the game is over before it's begun. We've got to be saying to the Canadian people: you can't tax cut your way to a productive 21st-century economy. You can talk that talk, but it's not going to give you a productive 21st-century economy, because it will scythe apart the public goods that make prosperity possible. That's what we've got to say, and so we shall.

Michael Ignatieff

cutting games thinking

Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

Michael Ignatieff

strong taken country

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

Michael Ignatieff

improvisation forget ideas

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.

Michael Ignatieff

states want world

Public service does not necessarily mean service in the House of Commons, and public service is not synonymous with partisan political activity. It comes in a thousand colours, but the common denominator is: it's not about me - it's about we.

Michael Ignatieff

political house mean

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

Michael Ignatieff

lingerie fans want

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

Michael Ignatieff

patriotism-and-nationalism nationalism patriotism

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

Michael Ignatieff

war mean thinking

You can't get back to power by defining your project in negative terms. But it helps to have somebody in office who represents the opposite of what you believe.

Michael Ignatieff

office opposites believe

If I am not elected, I imagine that I will ask Harvard to let me back.

Michael Ignatieff

harvard let-me imagine

The Only cure for nihilism is for liberal democratic societies - their electorates, their judiciary, and their political leadership- to insist that force is legitimate only to the degree that it serves defensible poltical goals. Thus implies a constant exercise of due diligence.

Michael Ignatieff

political goal exercise

Tad Homer-Dixon is a rare kind of public intellectual, who combines real expertise with a commitment to communicate to the widest possible readership. In The Ingenuity Gap he wants us all to wake-up to the fearful possibility that our blithe trust in science and technology may be misplaced. Human ingenuity may not be capable of coping with two emerging crises of this century and the next: population growth and environmental despoliation. Read Homer Dixon's wake-up call and you will see the future very differently.

Michael Ignatieff

technology real commitment

The Conservatives hold rural places because they keep bombarding rural Canada with, "Liberals are a bunch of urban, metropolitan snobs who don't care about you and want to leave you dead by the roadside." We've simply got to go out and say, "they're lying to you about us. We actually care about you more than the other guys, and we're not going to pander to your prejudices - we're going to give hope to your kids."

Michael Ignatieff

giving kids lying