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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Intellectuals are good at seeing the big picture. But they are not so good at process.

I went into politics thinking that, if I made arguments in good faith, I'd get a hearing. It's a reasonable assumption, but it's wrong. In five and a half years in politics up north, no one really bothered to criticize my ideas, such as they were. It was never my message that was the issue. It was always the messenger.

After spending the 1980s building up Saddam's Iraq as a counterweight to Iran, U.S. policy abruptly reversed course with his invasion of Kuwait and has since tried to cut him down to size. The policy is called 'containment,' but the question is, containment of what?

When we say, even in a global village, that all politics is local, we mean that national sovereignties are the only reliable source of political authority.

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

The legitimacy of coercive acts in a democracy arises from the process by which they are justified and by the degree to which we regard decisions as rational. If the justifications proceed properly, through recognized public institutions, and if they make sense to us, they are legitimate.

The war waged against terror since September 11 puts a strain on democracy itself, because it is mostly waged in secret, using means that are at the edge of both law and morality. Yet democracies have shown themselves capable of keeping the secret exercise of power under control.

Politics is intensely physical: your hands touch, clasp and hold, and your eyes are always reaching for contact. None of this came naturally to me. I'd always put my trust in words and let the words do the work, but in politics, the real message is physical.

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

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.

What everybody forgets is that when I was a journalist in Britain and in the United States, I was always a Canadian. And the price of expatriation does not go down, it goes up. I never felt part of the political common sense of Britain. I never felt it in the United States. I had no natural home in Britain and the U.S.

Patriotism is the secret resource of a successful society.

I'm not tribal Labour. I'm a Liberal at heart. Different tradition, different language.

I had no inkling of how crazy the political life would turn out to be. You shuttle between your constituency and Ottawa, you try to make every barbecue, festival, parade and charity run, but sometimes you feel pulled in 14 directions at once.

I'd always admired the intellectuals who had made the transition into politics - Mario Vargas Llosa in Peru, Vaclav Havel in the Czech Republic, Carlos Fuentes in Mexico - but I knew that many of them had failed, and in any event, I wasn't exactly in their league.

Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model of state domination, it is very much alive in the People's Republic of China and in Putin's police state.

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.

Politics isn't a reality show or a gong show. It's not show business for ugly people. It's the arena where we define our common life in a rough and ready contest that has winners and losers.