There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.
Michael IgnatieffInequality is not just an issue between individuals, between classes, between regions. It's between urban and rural.
Michael IgnatieffFamily 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 IgnatieffNo kid graduating in a political science class in Canada should not understand what's happened to income inequality since the 1970s, period. And then, what do we do about it? It's the biggest problem out there, in all western liberal societies.
Michael IgnatieffCynics who say power is all that counts in politics forget that power without ideas is just improvisation.
Michael IgnatieffGenocide 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