I think no one could have made peace in Bosnia besides Holbrooke.

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

We have to invest in Saskatchewan and . . . listen to Saskatchewan . . . and learn from Saskatchewan.

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.

…our species is one, and each of the individuals who compose it are entitled to equal moral consideration.

There’s a way in which these guys all think absolutely media, day and night. Access is what it’s all about, so they spin 24 hours a day and that’s a problem.

I remember the intellectual fashion for American decline in the 1970s. There was the stunning defeat of the U.S. in Vietnam , rioting in Detroit and Newark that suggested the social fabric was coming apart,...

If you get the access to see history happen, do you understand the history when it does happen? And the answer to that question is no, you don’t.

Memory is the only afterlife I have ever believed in. But the forgetting inside us cannot be stopped. We are programmed to betray.

There’s intense national feeling in America that could be called patriotism.

I’d be wary of writing this country off. There are some scary and ugly things about it, but it remains a turbulently, explosively innovative place.

If you say that we’re going to intervene to stop ethnic cleansing but we’re only going to do it at 15,000 feet, you can’t actually do it.

One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own...

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

I don’t think you’ll have to wait long. I’m not in a Hamlet-like state of indecision.

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

We have got to plant our standard firmly on the centre-left of Canadian politics.

We’re going out to rescue people who are being slaughtered or massacred, but we’re going to do it at zero personal cost to ourselves.

I spent five years in the United States. I admire and respect American institutions.

My chief concern about the way we’re going is that new technology, precision weapons technology, appears to be giving us a new moral alibi.

I don’t support the Americans any more and I, in many ways, would hope they would leave sooner rather than later. But I do support Iraqi democracy.

What we want is to become masters in our own house.

If we are a national institution, we must as a party reunite in rural and agricultural Canada. We can’t be a national institution if we’re only going for votes in Vancouver, Montreal and Halifax.

Nationalism could almost be defined as intense national feeling for a country that does not yet exist, or for someone else’s country.

I am fighting to revive faith, not just in the Liberal party, but in politics itself. I’m a devoted Liberal, I’ve been one all my life. That’s why I’m in the fight to renew the...

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...

I respect the work Mr. Harper has done to learn French, to make a ‘gesture’ toward Quebec. My criticism of him is that he’s making promises I don’t think he can keep.

Patriotism is strong nationalistic feeling for a country whose borders and whose legitimacy and whose ethnic composition is taken for granted.

None of us, none of us are going to run against each other. All of us are running against Stephen Harper’s vision of Canada.

All war aims for impunity.

The wars of the future will be fought by computer technicians and by lawyers and high-altitude specialists, and that may mean war will be increasingly abstract, hard to think about and hard to control.

You can’t spend your whole life teaching people about public service without finally thinking that you should put your money where your mouth is.

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

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.

a theater of displacement, in which political energies that might otherwise have been expended in defending multiethnic society at home were directed instead at defending mythic multiculturalism far away. Bosnia became the latest bel espoir...

I distinguish, between nationalism and patriotism.

There’s a civic nationalism in Britain and dozens of other countries.

Canadians want a country. They don’t want a community of communities. I’m committed to the national unity of the country.