What makes the United Nations an appropriate source of legitimacy for intervention is that it is the only place where the claims of the strong are put through the test of justification in front of the weak.

Belief in liberal freedom and democracy is always belief in it in a particular place, in a national home with histories that only those who are born in a place or who adopt its citizenship can hope to understand.

Trouble is, we call politics a game, but it isn't one. There is no referee, and the teams make up the rules as they go along. You can't cry foul or offside in politics. Almost anything goes.

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.

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

I can't think of this country without Quebec. Je parle francais. And when I think about being a Canadian, speaking French is part of it.

The disagreeable reality for those who believe in human rights is that there are some occasions - and Iraq may be one of them - when war is the only real remedy for regimes that live by terror.

Loving a country is an act of the imagination.

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

All war aims for impunity.

Since Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in setting up the United Nations and the Nuremberg trials, the U.S. has promoted universal legal norms and the institutions to enforce them while seeking, by hook or by crook, to exempt American citizens, especially soldiers, from their actual application.

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.

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.

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.

For someone like me who, as a kid, walked to school muttering little political speeches to myself, it was irresistible to finally get a chance at political life for real. When the people of Etobicoke-Lakeshore elected me their MP, it changed me forever.

Relying exclusively on air power has limits: planes are effective against fixed strategic targets, like petroleum storage, bridges, and command bunkers; but even then, air power rarely succeeds by itself in destroying a regime's ability to command and control its forces.

Politics is a tough game. But would I change places with a trauma nurse in an emergency ward on a busy Saturday night? No way. There are lots of jobs in the world that are tougher than politics. And politicians and people who've done it need to remember that.

Commerce has changed the ethics of citizenship and the incentives for national service. America now buys private contractors - we used to call them mercenaries - to do the country's fighting.

Thinkers too often disparage men of action in ways that do them no credit.

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.

Lincoln was not an intellectual, but no one in 200 years understood the language of the King James Bible or learned Blackstone's Laws of England, or Cicero, or the language of the Founding Fathers, better than he did.

Those with a gift for action, for their part, often express contempt for those whose gifts are more reflective. Men of action like to say, 'Those who can, do, those who can't, teach,' forgetting that those who teach get to write the history books.

If the only people who can succeed in politics are people who go in at 25, that'd be too bad. That'd be a shame.

A society is not a market. It is a political community.

Conservatives believe that international institutions such as the United Nations are anti-American and anti-Israeli cabals. Progressives do not like the economic medicine that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank force down the throats of developing countries.

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

I am an English-speaking Canadian, but my entire family - Russian exiles and the Canadians they married - is buried in Quebec, and if Quebec were to separate, I would feel I had been cut in two.

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

All the best reasons for going into politics never really change: the desire for glory and fame and the chance to do something that really matters, that will make life better for a lot of people.

I teach students that what people say about failure in politics is mostly wrong. People always told me, 'They'll praise you on your way up and kick you on your way down.' That wasn't my experience. I can't walk down the street in Toronto without someone coming up and saying hello.

Desert Storm was seen by the military establishment and by some politicians as avenging Vietnam, but it left behind dangerous illusions. The victory was so decisive, and information about it so carefully managed, that the American public was never clearly informed that it was purchased at the price of approximately 100,000 Iraqi lives.

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

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

In politics, there's a kind of literal-mindedness. It's what you say, not what you mean, and you have to say only what you mean.

Secessionists, whether in Scotland, Catalonia, Quebec or anywhere else, invariably assume that a person must either be Scottish or British, Catalan or Spanish, Quebecois or Canadian. What about those who feel they are both?

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

I've been both a journalist and a politician, and I can tell you it is more fun to ask the questions than have to answer them.

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.

There are no techniques in politics.

Affirming belief that America is an exceptional nation has become a test of patriotism in American politics.

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

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.

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.

The ultimate good in a liberal state is liberty.

Politics is like getting a really bad review: a stinker that you know all your friends are reading.

Some of our finest leaders were not intellectuals at all, and I admire them enormously because they weren't. Harry Truman wasn't.

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 Prince's blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the 'Evil Machiavel.' The outrage has not dimmed with time.

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

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