Pierre Trudeau

Pierre Trudeau (1919-2000)

Prime Minister of Canada

• We take the position that there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation.
  • comment upon decriminalizing homosexuality

• Living next to you (the USA) is in some ways like sleeping with an elephant. No matter how friendly or temperate the beast, one is affected by every twitch and grunt.
  • March 25, 1969, Addressing the Press Club in Washington, D.C.

• There are no spectacular choices in a country like Canada.

• Trudeau: Yes, well there are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don't like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is, go on and bleed. But it is more important to keep law and order in the society than to worry about weak-kneed people who don't like the looks of—
  CBC reporter (interrupting): At any cost? How far would you go with that? How far would you extend that?
  Trudeau: Well, just watch me.

• Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled.

• I've been called worse things by better people.
  • comment about being called "that asshole" by Richard Nixon

• Fuck off.
  • comment alleged to have been made to an opposition MP in the House of Commons
• Fuddle-duddle or something like that.
  • comment to the media, explaining what he told the MP

• Canada is a country built against any common, geographic, historic or cultural sense.

• It's not a perfect job, but it sure beats working.

• If you don't stop that, I'll kick you right in the ass.
  • to an MP heckling him in the House of Commons, May 4, 1977

• Well, why should I sell your wheat?
  • To protesters arguing about the then current wheat price

• I am trying to put Quebec in its place--and the place of Quebec is in Canada.

• Of course a bilingual state is more expensive than a unilingual one--but it is a richer state.

• Nuclear weapons exist. They probably always will. And they work, with horrible efficiency. They threaten the very future of our species. We have no choice but to manage that risk. Never again can we put the task out of our minds; nor trivialize it; nor make it routine. Nor dare we lose heart.
  • Feb. 9, 1984

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

• Mangez de la merde. (Eat shit)
  • To a group of striking Montreal mail truck drivers.

On Trudeau

• Irving Taylor: "In Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Canada has at last produced a political leader worthy of assassination."

• John Lennon: "If all politicians were like Pierre Trudeau, there would be world peace."