Pierre Trudeau

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

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

Canada is not a country for the cold of heart or the cold of feet.

Luck, that's when preparation and opportunity meet.

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.

Canada will be a strong country when Canadians of all provinces feel at home in all parts of the country, and when they feel that all Canada belongs to them.

We wish nothing more, but we will accept nothing less. Masters in our own house we must be, but our house is the whole of Canada.

Harvard was an extraordinary window on the world.

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

What sets a canoeing expedition apart is that it purifies you more rapidly and inescapably than any other. 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.

Paddling a canoe is a source of enrichment and inner renewal.

Canada will be a strong country when Canadians of all provinces feel at home in all parts of the country and when they feel that all Canada belongs to them.

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

The essential ingredient of politics is timing.

I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat.