Pierre Trudeau Quotes (1919-2000)

“Well, I am trying to put Quebec in its place — and the place of Quebec is in Canada, nowhere else.”

“The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not to be worshipped. It is our future in which we will find our greatness.”

“The past is to be respected and acknowledged, but not to be worshipped. It is our future in which we will find our greatness.”

“Until we know what final explanation [the Soviets] give and we have made a judgment on that explanation, it is premature to say what we are going to do about it.”

“As against the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, there has to be a visible hand of politicians whose objective is to have the kind of society that is caring and humane.”

“Liberalism is the philosophy for our time, because it does not try to conserve every tradition of the past, because it does not apply to new problems the old doctrinaire solutions, because it is prepared to experiment and innovate and because it knows that the past is less important than the future.”

“Trudeau: Well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed. But it's more important to keep law and order in the society than to be worried about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of a soldier— CBC reporter Tim Ralfe [interrupting]: At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that? Trudeau: Well, just watch me. … Society must take every means at its disposal to defend itself against the emergence of a parallel power which defies the elected power.”

“In the West, Mr. President, we have a long familiarity with the pressures of change. In the past decade our economies have undergone a severe test, as trusted assumptions have been found wanting. In the 1970's we were buffetted by the rude shock of rapid energy price increases. We were forced to recognize that the old monopoly of economic power was coming to an end. And yet for all the strains upon us, our political and economic framework has survived, survived at least as well as the chicken and the neck to which Winston Churchill once referred in this chamber. Each of the Western countries has met the challenge of change in its own way. Since all of us have our own distinctive economic strengths and weaknesses, our solutions have had to be diverse. We have found no simple answers. We've fashioned no single way. With cooperation and consultation, however, we've been able to complement our various approaches.”

“Nations do not choose their neighbors; geography does that. The sense of neighborhood, however, is more than a product of geography; it is a creation of people who may live as far apart as California and Quebec. It is what makes neighbors of Canada and Mexico, for instance. Canadians have noted this sense in you, Mr. President, and they know that it gives a particular meaning to your visit to Ottawa. Our neighborhood, Mr. President, is not only a place but a state of mind, not only North America but the New World. We share the dreams that have made this continent a beacon, a hope, and a haven for people everywhere. We share the courage and joy in hard work that enabled us to build two great federal states side by side, from our first landfalls on the Atlantic to our last frontiers on the Pacific. We cherish what we have made. We are determined to preserve it, but at the same time we have been glad to admit others to the bounty and freedom we have found here.”

“Nations do not choose their neighbors; geography does that. The sense of neighborhood, however, is more than a product of geography; it is a creation of people who may live as far apart as California and Quebec. It is what makes neighbors of Canada and Mexico, for instance. Canadians have noted this sense in you, Mr. President, and they know that it gives a particular meaning to your visit to Ottawa. Our neighborhood, Mr. President, is not only a place but a state of mind, not only North America but the New World. We share the dreams that have made this continent a beacon, a hope, and a haven for people everywhere. We share the courage and joy in hard work that enabled us to build two great federal states side by side, from our first landfalls on the Atlantic to our last frontiers on the Pacific. We cherish what we have made. We are determined to preserve it, but at the same time we have been glad to admit others to the bounty and freedom we have found here.”

“I told my friends: 'They chose the wrong guy.' I thought that Joe Clark would be a far stronger opponent than Brian Mulroney.”

“Pierre Trudeau was too much of a professional politician to be described as a good man, nor, it can be argued despite much publicity to the contrary, was he a particularly clever or even wise one. But he was a great man, perhaps the greatest Canada has produced in this century.”

“The only thing as out of step with the times as baseball was Canada, which was in the strange embrace of something called Trudeaumania. This country that became the home to an estimated fifty to one hundred U.S. military deserters and hundreds more draft dodgers was becoming a weirdly happy place. Pierre Elliott Trudeau became the new Liberal prime minister of Canada. Trudeau was one of the few prime ministers in the history of Canada to have been described as flashy. At forty-six and unmarried, he was the kind of politician who people wanted to meet, touch, kiss. He was known for his unusual dress, sandals, a green leather coat, and for other unpredictable whimsy. He even once slid down the bannister of the House of Commons while holding piles of legislation. He practiced yoga, loved skin diving, and had a brown belt in karate. He had a stack of prestigious graduate degrees from Harvard, London, and Paris and until 1968 was known more as an intellectual than a politician. In fact, one of the few things he was not known to have experienced very much of was politics.”

“Esther Delisle, a Quebec historian, has run into trouble by attempting to show some ambiguities in that picture. She argues that Abbe Lionel Groulx, the renowned scholar and teacher, has become an icon to French-Canadian nationalists who manage, however, to overlook his anti-Semitism. While the nationalists stress the wrongs done to Quebec in the conscription crises of the two world wars, she points out that they fail to deal with the fact that in Quebec during World War II there was considerable sympathy for the pro-Nazi Vichy government of France. As recent works on Trudeau confirm, he, like other members of the young French elite, carried on his life and career between 1939 and 1943 without paying much attention to what was going on in the world. “Reading the memoirs,” writes Delisle, “of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Gerard Pelletier and Gerard Fillion, among other French Canadians promised to prestigious careers, one could conclude that they saw nothing, heard nothing, and said nothing at the time, and that they were only interested in (and marginally, at that) the struggle against conscription.... There is more to the silence and lies than a simple narcissistic scratch. There is the need to hide positions which the Allied victory made unspeakable. These men would have to forget, and make others forget, their attraction to the siren songs of fascism and dictatorship in the worst cases, and in the best, their lack of opposition to them.””

“Go bang the window and see what happens — just go test it. See that? Trudeau had the office bulletproofed. I always contended that the reason he did it was because the American embassy is right outside. They probably wanted to shoot him.”