MICHAEL IGNATIEFF

Desert Storm created the pattern for the American way of war that eventually prevailed in Kosovo. America learned from Vietnam that unilateral use of force eventually forfeits international legitimacy and domestic support. Desert Storm demonstrated the political necessity of coalition warfare.

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

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

A good journalist is modest; his only job is simple: to decide what counts as news.

All war aims for impunity.

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.

I've always thought Anne-Marie Slaughter would make a fantastic United States Senator or something. She's a real intellectual, but she's got enormous communicative skills and she's got government experience. The thing that drives me slightly crazy is the way we think about intellectuals as wooly, hopeless, arrogant, self-deceived, incapable.

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.

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

If the history of the western moral imagination is the story of an enduring and unending revolt against human cruelty, there are few more consequential figures than Raphael Lemkin - and few whose achievements have been more ignored by the general public. It was he who coined the word 'genocide.' He was also its victim.

The detention of Japanese Americans during World War II would qualify as an example of majoritarian tyranny and misuse of executive prerogative, driven by fear and racial bias.

I was with the U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali on the day that Srebrenica fell, which happened to be a huge historical turning point in the Bosnian war.

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.

We wanted this war and now we've got it, and I'm not sure that we know what to do with it.

Ultimate authority in a global system remains with sovereigns. Governments will not have it any other way: politicians face instant rejection from their electorate if they allow transnational authorities to dictate terms.

I have been a journalist, off and on, since I was 17. I was a copy boy for the 'New York Times,' when it had an edition in Paris, in 1963. I sold the paper in the streets by day and tore wire copy off the tele-printer for the editors making up the edition by night.

There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.

For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Cote d'Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.

I'm a Canadian. I've always been a Canadian.

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.

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.

I had a lot of hubris going into politics, but I didn't think I was Pierre Trudeau.

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.

Your generation and mine have had very little real experience; we've been severed from the direct experience of war by some very good things. By the end of the draft, and by the defeat in Vietnam.

There are hundreds of thousands of Scots who acknowledge English, Irish or Welsh parts of their very being. Lives and destinies are similarly intertwined in Catalonia and Spain, in Ukraine and Russia.