There are all kinds of different forms of public service, but there's no form of public service that can make more difference for more people than partisan political activity.

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.

In academic life, false ideas are merely false and useless ones can be fun to play with. In political life, false ideas can ruin the lives of millions and useless ones can waste precious resources. An intellectual's responsibility for his ideas is to follow their consequences wherever they may lead. A politician's responsibility is to master those consequences and prevent them from doing harm. Michael Ignatieff, a former professor at Harvard and contributing writer for the magazine, is a member of Canada's Parliament and deputy leader of the Liberal Party.

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions-and Iraq may be one of them-when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

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.

It's good for people to believe in causes larger than themselves.

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.