Top 35 Michael Ignatieff Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “It’s good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.”

— Michael Ignatieff

2. “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

3. “Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.”

— Michael Ignatieff

4. “Political utopias are a form of nostalgia for an imagined past projected onto the future as a wish.”

— Michael Ignatieff

5. “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

6. “Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.”

— Michael Ignatieff

7. “There’s a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.”

— Michael Ignatieff

8. “Well, I’m an absolute fan of lacy lingerie. I want to make that perfectly clear.”

— Michael Ignatieff

9. “Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It’s good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.”

— Michael Ignatieff

10. “To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war.”

— Michael Ignatieff

11. “I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.”

— Michael Ignatieff

12. “America’s entire war on terror is an exercise in imperialism. This may come as a shock to Americans, who don’t like to think of their country as an empire. But what else can you call America’s legions of soldiers, spooks and special forces straddling the globe?”

— Michael Ignatieff

13. “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

14. “Scar Tissue is the only book Ive ever written when Ive felt completely toxic, ill.”

— Michael Ignatieff

15. “Mr. Kaplan is the first traveler to take us on a journey to the jagged places where these tectonic plates meet, and his argument – that our future is being shaped far away ‘at the ends of the earth’ – makes his travelogue pertinent and compelling reading.”

— Michael Ignatieff

16. “All war aims for impunity.”

— Michael Ignatieff

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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

20. “There’s a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.”

— Michael Ignatieff

21. “Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.”

— Michael Ignatieff

22. “Because we remain a land of hope and opportunity, and new Canadians see in our unfinished destiny an image of their own unfinished destines.”

— Michael Ignatieff

23. “The medium’s gaze is brief, intense, and promiscuous. The shelf life of the moral causes it makes its own is brutally short.”

— Michael Ignatieff

24. “It’s good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.”

— Michael Ignatieff

25. “Canadians want a country. They don’t want a community of communities. I’m committed to the national unity of the country.”

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

Featured in: Strong Quotes

27. “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

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

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

31. “There’s intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.”

— Michael Ignatieff

32. “I had a feeling of shame about my grief, as if I was making false amends for the bitterness I felt towards him when he was alive.”

— Michael Ignatieff

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

— Michael Ignatieff

34. “Fascism is not just any politics you don’t like. Fascism is the explicit use of political violence, hitting people, killing people, knocking people over, invading an assembly with armed thugs.”

— Michael Ignatieff

35. “Once you begin throwing your life away, you have to go through it until the compulsion to destroy has run its course.”

— Michael Ignatieff