Michael Ignatieff Quotes

When applied to politics and taken to its extreme, kitsch is the mask of death. Fascism was all aesthetics. There was no core principle to it. There was no truth to it.

It's the story of an American who wants to become a dictator and goes to Europe with a sidekick to interview various Fascists to find out how the Nazis and Mussolini got into power.

I'm not comparing Bush to Adolf Hitler - because George Bush, for one thing, is not as smart as Adolf Hitler.

Moderates behind whom Red Fascism spreads.

This country is going so far right you are not even going to recognize it.

Anti-Americanism is a form of Fascism.

History shows that populism polarizes society, weakens economies, and undermined representative democracy.

I so totally refuse to 'make an effort to understand' the people who have become vectors for a fascist spectacular politics.

Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a saint. He was a martyr. Like many martyrs, he held extreme views.

We didn't take the words of Vladimir Lenin seriously until Communism spread across the globe. And unfortunately, the president didn't take the words of groups like ISIS seriously until they established a sweeping self-proclaimed Islamic Caliphate.

I have often thought that if a rational Fascist dictatorship were to exist, then it would choose the American system.

To write is a relief from life's problems. It is a way in which you revenge yourself. In art, the writer achieves utopia. But any attempt to achieve social utopia is bound to catastrophe. If you want a society of saints, the result is hell, repression, totalitarianism, and persecution.

If we haven't become the Liberty Party of an undoubted future, let us take this fact: the great totalitarian regimes have died. The Soviet Union broke up along ethnic lines, as we always thought it would. The Chinese - am I wrong? - are becoming a commercial civilization.

The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.

Left-wingers and right-wingers come together when they become extreme enough. The Nazi Party was called National Socialism, very similar to Stalin's Communism, with the addition of 'the Fatherland.'

Obviously I don't hate America. I do believe that we are becoming - and I can only judge it by my lifetime, 'cause I don't know what it was like in the 1800s - but it just seems that as a nation, we are becoming really, really nasty, and not concerned with any kind of truth.

Nationalism is a tool increasingly used by leaders to bolster their authority, especially amid difficult economic and political conditions.

Authoritarians have always been here. But the features of a given moment make that way of thinking more or less appealing. Germany in the 1920s, when people are starving, suddenly makes 'populist' answers and scapegoating different groups as the source of the problem much more appealing.

The propagandistic American 'media' and the crazed neoconservatives have set humanity on the path to destruction.

Some who campaign against hate, seem to hate the Brexit party more than they love peace.

Russia has taken advantage of its exalted status among right-wing extremists to expand its influence throughout Europe.

Remember: real politics isn't about figureheads and seats in parliament. Real politics is about ideas. And there can be no doubt regarding the extreme ideas that have been gaining ground in the Netherlands for decades.

Radicalism and extremism, while they are dangers, they exist in every society on some level.

The attempt to politicize everything is the destruction of politics. When everything is seen as relevant to politics, than politics has in fact become totalitarian.

What we are confronted with now is a growing perception that if we desire a certain type of civilization and culture we must exterminate the sort of people who do not fit into it.