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. Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S. Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
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. Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren’t. Harry Truman wasn’t. Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading. Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
I don’t want to be someone sitting in my rocking chair at the end saying, ‘Well, I passed.’ My mum used to say life isn’t for sissies. Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
The Prince’s blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the ‘Evil Machiavel.’ The outrage has not dimmed with time. Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
What’s distinctively shocking about Machiavelli is that he didn’t care. He believed not only that politicians must do evil in the name of the public good, but also that they shouldn’t worry about it. He was unconcerned, in other words, with what modern thinkers call ‘the problem of dirty hands.’ Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
Politics is intensely physical: your hands touch, clasp and hold, and your eyes are always reaching for contact. None of this came naturally to me. I’d always put my trust in words and let the words do the work, but in politics, the real message is physical. Michael Ignatieff Read Quote
