When I appointed the Minister of the Environment to major cabinet status, the Planning and Priorities committee, the signals that that sent through Ottawa were major, because that's what the bureaucracy understands.

There are so many demands on your time, on your resources, and on the prestige of the government.

Whether the process proves to be Kyoto or something else, let's acknowledge the urgency of global warming.

You can't be chasing 15 rabbits. Otherwise, the public mind cannot follow you.

I am not denying anything I did not say.

In politics, madame, you need two things: friends, but above all an enemy.

You accumulate political capital to spend it on noble causes for Canada. If you're afraid to spend your capital, you shouldn't be there.

We decided that the environment was an integral part of our policies and the political thrust of our government. We gave it the priority and we sustained it with the money required to make it happen.

You cannot name a Canadian prime minister who has done as many significant things as I did, because there are none.

If everything is very important, then nothing is important.

The Conservatives over the years have done a great deal, from Sir John A, to Diefenbaker, and others.

And, of course, the fact that Maurice Strong, a Canadian, was in charge made it important for us to pull up our socks and become leaders in this field. Now, here is a field we should be a leader in!

It's my responsibility, and entirely my fault, Of course I regret it. It's the kind of locker-room conversation we all use, but as prime minister I shouldn't have used it.

When I appointed the Minister of the Environment to major cabinet status, the Planning and Priorities committee, the signals that that sent through Ottawa were major, because that's what the bureaucracy understands.

So that was Reagan's political problem. As a rancher in California, he was an environmentalist himself. But the President of the United States doesn't control everything that happens in Washington.

Every cabinet minister gets a mission statement from the Prime Minister.

Once you articulate an agenda, you have to follow it.

And look, I was a big, brassy guy who won and won big. I did what I wanted.

I think the government has to reposition environment on top of their national and international priorities.

First, President Reagan was not enthusiastic. But I built up a relationship with him in other areas and then persuaded him that this was important to us and to me, and that we had to at least be in the process of looking at this seriously.

Trudeau's contribution was not to build Canada but to destroy it, and I had to come in and save it.

We created the Cabinet Committee on the Environment to review the environmental implications of all government initiatives. I think what made us successful was the fact that it was a sustained approach. We did something new every year.

You have to spend your political capital on great causes for your country.

I can see now a vision emerging how Canada is going to profit in the future from our Arctic resources without destroying the environment on which it is all based.

For example, the Prime Minister earlier this year talked about the importance of the Arctic to our future. He's right. A hundred years from now, the strength of Canada is going to be coming from our resources in the Arctic.

I would go to them and I would explain this is the price of going forward. We're going to move ahead in all these other areas. We're moving ahead in tax reform and GST, we are moving ahead on trade, but this will not be done at the cost of the environment.

The biggest trading partner of the United States is not West Germany or Japan, it's right here.

If your only objective is to be popular, you're going to be popular but you will be known as the Prime Minister who achieved nothing.

Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.

The U.S. government has in recent years fought what it termed wars against AIDs, drug abuse, poverty, illiteracy and terrorism. Each of those wars has budgets, legislation, offices, officials, letterhead - everything necessary in a bureaucracy to tell you something is real.

The minute health care becomes a huge, unwieldy, expensive government bureaucracy it's a permanent feature of life and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

That is why I strongly believe we should working in Congress to make America a better place to run a business by reducing the costly burdens of bureaucracy and red tape.

Publicly, we're saying we're better at fighting terrorism. Privately, we know that the bureaucracy has only gotten worse, since the high-level people are scared of being held responsible for 9/11.

The only thing that saves us from the bureaucracy is its inefficiency.

Government proposes, bureaucracy disposes. And the bureaucracy must dispose of government proposals by dumping them on us.

If you are going to sin, sin against God, not the bureaucracy. God will forgive you but the bureaucracy won't.

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

Twenty-first century medicine must not be confined to a twentieth-century bureaucracy.

I see my job as being to facilitate the life of clinical researchers so that they can be more productive, and trying to keep the bureaucracy from getting in their way.

Any plan of administration which contemplates a concentrating of responsibility is open to the dangers which follow the creation of a bureaucracy.

Every year the Federal Government wastes billions of dollars as a result of overpayments of government agencies, misuse of government credit cards, abuse of the Federal entitlement programs, and the mismanagement of the Federal bureaucracy.

Temporary teams of trusted people are generally sent to all Departments and to major agencies of government to assist in planning and to acquaint the incoming administration with the civil servants and bureaucracy that will remain in place in the new Administration.

We need to remind our core supporters that we have not forgotten their concern with the way our democracy is being replaced by European bureaucracy in so many areas.

When the TSA was established, it was never envisioned that it would become a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy which was soon to grow to 67,000 employees.

The disease which inflicts bureaucracy and what they usually die from is routine.

German businessmen are overwhelmed by the high cost of doing business. Inflexible rules, enforced by a burgeoning bureaucracy, discourage entrepreneurship.

Other countries, such as Israel, successfully employ behavior detection techniques at their airports, but the bloated, ineffective bureaucracy of TSA has produced another security failure for U.S. transportation systems.

TSA serves as the operator, administrator and regulator for the nation's transportation security. But in fact, the TSA bureaucracy does all it can to thwart any conversion to a system with more private-sector operations and strong federal oversight and standards. This agency cannot, and should not, do it all.

Bureaucracy gives birth to itself and then expects maternity benefits.