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

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.

The association promotes a way of life, not causes; a harmony in living, not political faiths; a bilateral loyalty, not commercial or social projects. Yet it is an association for as noble a purpose as any involved in any prior decisions.

Happy the man who has been able to learn the causes of things.

There is one thing higher than Royalty: and that is religion, which causes us to leave the world, and seek God.

The methods of peace propaganda which aim at establishing peace doctrine by argument and by creating a feeling favorable to peace in general seem to fall short of reaching the springs of human action and of dealing with the causes of the conduct which they seek to modify.

Having played an angel for so long, you can imagine that I've been asked to endorse any number of causes over the years. Obviously I have to limit my participation with any charity, so I decided to really concentrate on my love of children.

The final causes, then, of compassion are to prevent and to relieve misery.

I wish I had the billions of dollars that George Soros has that he has used to fund Democratic causes in the past.

It ain't ignorance that causes all the trouble in this world. It's the things people know that ain't so.

The knowledge of anything, since all things have causes, is not acquired or complete unless it is known by its causes.

You may count on Mexico's support, since your commitment to the noblest causes of mankind and your vast experience are and will be invaluable in enabling us, together, to achieve a better world.

In the order of literature, as in others, there is no act that is not the coronation of an infinite series of causes and the source of an infinite series of effects.

It was hard to figure out what were the good causes, the bad causes, even the good politics and the bad politics. So we started taking requests and figuring it out.

Waste no time with revolutions that do not remove the causes of your complaints but simply change the faces of those in charge.

To deal with the true causes of war one must begin by recognizing as of prime relevancy to the solution of the problem the familiar fact that civilization is a partial, incomplete, and, to a great extent, superficial modification of barbarism.

Evil events from evil causes spring.

Therefore in medicine we ought to know the causes of sickness and health.

Beauty is a precious trace that eternity causes to appear to us and that it takes away from us. A manifestation of eternity, and a sign of death as well.

The same characters that keep reappearing, bigger than life, find their own integrity in doing what they do the way they do it, even if it causes their own deaths.

Happiness is a real, objective phenomenon, scientifically verifiable. That means people and whole societies can now be measured over time and compared accurately with one another. Causes and cures for unhappiness can be quantified.

The United Nations charter gives every nation the right to self defence, therefore when the American embassies were bombed it was a matter of time before the Americans responded by going for what they suspected were the causes of the attack.

Sex: the thing that takes up the least amount of time and causes the most amount of trouble.