Pierre Trudeau Quotes

• We take the position that there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.
• Living next to you is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly and even-tempered is the beast, if I can call it that, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
• 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.
• If Canada is to survive, it can only survive in mutual respect and in love for one another.
• Oh, for Christ's sake shut up. Obviously the New Democratic Party is not only misinformed but uninterested in the subject.
• Travel a thousand miles by train and you are a brute; pedal five hundred on a bicycle and you remain basically a bourgeois; paddle a hundred in a canoe and you are already a child of nature.
• I don't really know what a cyclotron is but I am certainly very happy Canada has one!
• 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.
• Fuck off.
• Oh, I don't know...fuddle-duddle or something like that.
• In Quebec, people are moved too often by passion and too little by intelligence.
• I've been called worse things by better people.
• Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent.
• Mr. Montgomery, there are only two things I do in bed. One of them is sleep and I wouldn't let you photograph the other one.
• Canada is a country built against any common, geographic, historic or cultural sense.
• Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens - it is an imposition on the state.
• Reporter: Will you give up the Mercedes? Trudeau: Are you talking about the car now, or the girl? Reporter: The car. Trudeau: I won't give up either.
• It's not a perfect job, but it sure beats working.
• If you don't stop that, I'll kick you right in the ass.
• I am trying to put Quebec in its place - and the place of Quebec is in Canada.
• Mr. Levesque was saying that part of my name was Elliott and since Elliot was an English name, it was perfectly understandable that I was for the No side, because, really, you see, I was not as much of a Quebecer as those who are going to vote Yes. That, my dear friends, is what contempt is:. It means saying that the Quebecers on the No side are not as good Quebecers as the others and perhaps they have a drop or two of foreign blood, while the people on the Yes side have pure blood in their veins.: Of course my name is Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Yes, Elliott was my mother's name. It was the name borne by the Elliotts who came to Canada more than 200 years ago. It is the name of the Elliotts who, more than 100 years ago, settled in Saint-Gabriel de Brandon, where you can still see their graves in the cemetery. That is what the Elliotts are. My name is a Quebec name - but my name is a Canadian name also.
• Of course a bilingual state is more expensive than a unilingual one - but it is a richer state.
• Nuclear weapons exist. They probably always will. And they work, with horrible efficiency. They threaten the very future of our species. We have no choice but to manage that risk. Never again can we put the task out of our minds; nor trivialize it; nor make it routine. Nor dare we lose heart.
• Some things I never learned to like. I didn't like to kiss babies, though I didn't mind kissing their mothers.
• Mangez de la merde. (Eat shit)
• 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 essential ingredient of politics is timing.
• English Canada doesn't have a culture - I'm going to give it one.
• In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.
• If all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace.
• Pierre Trudeau was too much of a professional politician to be described as a good man, nor, it can be argued despite much pubilicity 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.

pierre trudeau