Quotes from Pierre Trudeau

The essential ingredient of politics is timing.

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

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

The best thing you can possibly do for a friend is to be his friend.

I've been called worse things by better people.

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

I speak of a Canada where men and women of aboriginal ancestry, of French and British heritage, of the diverse cultures of the world, demonstrate the will to share this land in peace, in justice and with mutual respect.

The attainment of a just society is the cherished hope of civilized men.

You know you have a lot of impatience with reality as you see it when you're a young man and full of dynamism and strength and ideals and so on.

Who is it that said that 'you have not converted a man because you have silenced him?' This is true of the use of the military on people.

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.

The new frontier lies not beyond the planets but within each one of us.

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

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

The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.

I want to separate sin from crime. You may have to ask forgiveness for your sins from God, but not from the Minister of Justice. There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.

I believe in God, and I'm a Christian.

Obviously I prefer freedom, but I know, and I think all history has told us, that freedom cannot flow from anarchy and disorder.

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

Luck, that's when preparation and opportunity meet.

My life is one long curve, full of turning points.

Because I am a deep believer in the civil society, I think we should be prepared to pay the consequences of breaking the law and that is either paying the penalty for it, or leaving the country.

In academic life you seek to state absolute truths; in politics you seek to accommodate truth to the facts around you.

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