Michael Ignatieff Quotes

When women love us, they forgive us everything, even our crimes; when they do not love us, they give us credit for nothing, not even our virtues.

Nothing is as peevish and pedantic as men's judgments of one another.

If we open our history books, we shall see that the laws, for all that they are or should be contracts amongst free men, have rarely been anything but the tools of the passions of a few men or the offspring of a fleeting and haphazard necessity.

I teach that all men are mad.

Memory is often less about truth than about what we want it to be.

Historians desiring to write the actions of men, ought to set down the simple truth, and not say anything for love or hatred

Examine history; consult present experience; and you will find that far the greater part of the quarrels between several nations had scarce any other occasion than that these nations were different combinations of people, and called by different names: to an Englishman, the name of a Frenchman, a Spaniard, an Italian, much more a Turk, or a Tartar, raises of course ideas of hatred and contempt.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

All men are not slimy warthogs. Some men are silly giraffes, some woebegone puppies, some insecure frogs. But if one is not careful, those slimy warthogs can ruin it for all the others.

I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way to pay the price for saying or seeing things.

Facts are the images of history, just as images are the facts of fiction.

Don't tell me what I'm not doing when I'm doing what you don't think I'm doing!

We men who serve science serve only a reflection in a mirror.

If you have a glass full of liquid you can discourse forever on its qualities, discuss whether it is cold, warm, whether it is really and truly composed of H-2-O, or even mineral water, or saki. Meditation is Drinking it!

A coward judges all he sees by what he is.

...now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow - moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women.

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

You never know what your history is going to be like until long after you're gone.

Gentlemen always seem to remember blondes.

Not the senses I have but what I do with them is my kingdom.

My good opinion once lost is lost forever.

All men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened.

You can change only what people know, not what they do.

History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.