Michael Ignatieff

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

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

There are no techniques in politics.

I've been both a journalist and a politician, and I can tell you it is more fun to ask the questions than have to answer them.

Both Iraq and Syria are a fissile mixture of ethnicities and religions thrown together after Versailles by departing French and British imperialists and only kept together by Baathist tyranny and violence.

There's a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.

In academic life, false ideas are merely false, and useless ones can be fun to play with.

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.

Not even a superpower can hold onto its economic sovereignty if it fails to get its fiscal house in order, and no one needs a well-regulated international economic order more than the United States.

I can't think of this country without Quebec. Je parle francais. And when I think about being a Canadian, speaking French is part of it.

Conservatives believe that international institutions such as the United Nations are anti-American and anti-Israeli cabals. Progressives do not like the economic medicine that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank force down the throats of developing countries.

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.

I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.

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.

Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.

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.

Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces.

If the only people who can succeed in politics are people who go in at 25, that'd be too bad. That'd be a shame.

I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.