Pierre Trudeau Quotes

Pierre Trudeau's selections come across as witty political musings about state, passion and national identity.

56 quotes

1. We take the position that there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. If Canada is to survive, it can only survive in mutual respect and in love for one another.

5. Oh, for Christ's sake shut up. Obviously the New Democratic Party is not only misinformed but uninterested in the subject.

6. 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.

7. I don't really know what a cyclotron is but I am certainly very happy Canada has one!

8. 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.

9. Fuck off.

10. Oh, I don't know...fuddle-duddle or something like that.

11. In Quebec, people are moved too often by passion and too little by intelligence.

12. I've been called worse things by better people.

13. Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent.

14. 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.

15. Canada is a country built against any common, geographic, historic or cultural sense.

16. Bilingualism is not an imposition on the citizens - it is an imposition on the state.

17. 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.

18. It's not a perfect job, but it sure beats working.

19. If you don't stop that, I'll kick you right in the ass.

20. I am trying to put Quebec in its place - and the place of Quebec is in Canada.

21. 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.

22. Of course a bilingual state is more expensive than a unilingual one - but it is a richer state.

23. 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.

24. Some things I never learned to like. I didn't like to kiss babies, though I didn't mind kissing their mothers.

25. Mangez de la merde. (Eat shit)

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

27. The essential ingredient of politics is timing.

28. English Canada doesn't have a culture - I'm going to give it one.

29. In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination.

30. If all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace.

31. 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.

32. Obviously, the state's responsibility should be to legislate rules for a well-ordered society. It has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation.

33. Canada is a country whose main exports are hockey players and cold fronts. Our main imports are baseball players and acid rain.

34. In specific terms I don't think I could make any suggestions, but in general terms I believe that it is because Canadians have been under the good influences of their churches that they are a tolerant people, an understanding and patient people, so that there has been little backlash against the excesses which have happened over the decades in French and in English Canada which might turn either group off.

35. I think that religions must seek peace and love and therefore be pacifist.

36. Freedom can flow from order. That is not to say that freedom always flows from order because you can have a totalitarian order and you can have an undemocratic order from which freedom will not flow, but that surest way to destroy freedom is to have chaos.

37. Every time I have a political rally I meet some people who say, "I need a job."

38. I'm far from believing that we've solved the problem of violence in the 20th century and that's why I'm not discouraged that we still have the Biafras and the Northern Irelands and the East Pakistans and, for that matter, violence in American or Canadian cities.

39. The Jesuits were good educators, exceptional teachers. In an era and in a society where freedom of speech was not held in high regard, of course, that the discourse be focused on what they were teaching, but we were able to go beyond this framework without incurring too great a risk.

40. Americans should never underestimate the constant pressure on Canada which the mere presence of the United States has produced. We're different people from you and we're different people because of you. 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 effected by every twitch and grunt. It should not therefore be expected that this kind of nation, this Canada, should project itself as a mirror image of the United States.

41. I must say that "Give Peace a Chance" has always seemed to me to be sensible advice.

42. There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. What's done in private between adults doesn't concern the Criminal Code.

43. I think all of us, politicians and churchmen, should do our utmost to change the society so that there would be no need for violence.

44. Perhaps the rediscovery of our humanity, and the potential of the human spirit which we have read about in legends of older civilizations, or in accounts of solitary mystics, or in tales of science fiction writers - perhaps this will constitute the true revolution of the future. The new frontier lies not beyond the planets but within each one of us.

45. The die is cast in Canada: there are two ethnic and linguistic groups; each is too strong and too deeply rooted in the past, too firmly bound to a mother culture, to be able to swamp the other. But if the two will collaborate inside of a truly pluralist state, Canada could become a privileged place where the federalist form of government, which is the government of tomorrow's world, will be perfected.

46. The state has an active role to play in ensuring that there is equilibrium between the constituent parts of the economy, the consumers and the producers.

47. You just cannot cut a country in two any more than you can cut a human being in two. If you do, you do not have two human beings; you have a corpse.

48. I think violence is counter-productive and it is bad in democratic societies.

49. I was too busy doing my job and living my life to spend time keeping notes for some future volume of memoirs.

50. When the religious principles, like the philosophical, are translated into reality, sometimes the reality forces violence on you, and there is no escape from it, and then I don't think it's something you should try to hide your face from.

51. A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.

52. As does every young man studying philosophy, I naturally asked myself questions about the truth of all this, and about the meaning of freedom, predestination, and liberty of choice and so on. But to have asked questions of yourself about it, I think is not too important. Let's say - I remain - I remained a believer.

53. I recognize that in some cases it's more important to have freedom and justice than to have peace.

54. I feel religion is basically and essentially a communication between a man and his God and I think it is the most personal thing of all and I don't think it concerns too many people.

55. I do object to the sensationalism or even the voyeurism of doing things in church or out of church.

56. I am peaceful but I am not a pacifist in the philosophical sense.