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.

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

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

Our hopes are high. Our faith in the people is great. Our courage is strong. And our dreams for this beautiful country will never die.

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

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.

I've been called worse things by better people.

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

I will use all my strength to bring about a just society to a nation living in a tough world.

Well, I am trying to put Quebec in its place - and the place of Quebec is in Canada, nowhere else.

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

Remember, pain and misery are transient and ephemeral but love has the healing power, which is eternal.

What a tremendous power one needs to become his own master!

A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it. It is different than patience. It is not thinking. It is working with the rhythm.

I wanted to be able to tell my grandkids one day, "Hey, your grandpa ran into a burning building and survived."

I would rather have five energetic and competent enemies than one fool friend.

Training a child is exactly like training a puppy; a little heedless inattention and it is out of hand immediately; the great thing is not to let it acquire bad habits that must afterward be broken.

Evil is short lived. Never judge of the whole round of life by the mere segment you can see. The whole is, in the end, perfect.

You have the most important job of anyone today. Our kids need you to advocate for their futures.

I would give someone a record so they could love the record, not so they would always know that I gave it to them.