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A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.

Pierre Trudeau

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Pierre Trudeau
Age: 80 †
Born: 1919
Born: October 18
Died: 2000
Died: September 28
Diarist
Former Prime Minister Of Canada
Journalist
Judge
Lawyer
Memoirist
Politician
Montreal
Quebec
Pierre Elliott Trudeau
Joseph Philippe Pierre Yves Elliott Trudeau
Leave
Shared
Values
Basic
Certain
Integrity
Country
Eternity
Every
Build
Something
Standing
Pharaohs
Honor
Defy
Built
Pyramids

More quotes by Pierre Trudeau

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Obviously, the state's responsibility should be to legislate rules for a well-ordered society. It has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation.
Pierre Trudeau
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I believe that Canada cannot, indeed, that Canada must not survive by force. The country will only remain united - it should only remain united - if its citizens want to live together in one civil society.
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Democracy demands that elected members be able to realize fully the role for which they have been chosen.
Pierre Trudeau
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There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation. What's done in private between adults doesn't concern the Criminal Code.
Pierre Trudeau
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We must now establish the basic principles, the basic values and beliefs which hold us together as Canadians so that beyond our regional loyalties there is a way of life and a system of values which make us proud of the country that has given us such freedom and such immeasurable joy.
Pierre Trudeau
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I was shaken to the extent that people who criticized me used to say that I was Protestant more than a Catholic because I like to impose constraints on myself, but I don't like them to be imposed from the outside.
Pierre Trudeau
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For my part...I am a realist but, somehow, optimism always keeps breaking out.
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I know the usual answer of Christ using violence to get the sellers out of the temple, but to me this was impatience rather than violence.
Pierre Trudeau
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Well, I am trying to put Quebec in its place - and the place of Quebec is in Canada, nowhere else.
Pierre Trudeau
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I feel perhaps I didn't deal with the question of violence in depth.
Pierre Trudeau
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I'm impatient not with the House of Commons as an institution, but with the way in which it is operated. This doesn't prove I don't believe in participatory democracy.
Pierre Trudeau
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Power only tires those who don't exercise it.
Pierre Trudeau
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Paddling a canoe is a source of enrichment and inner renewal.
Pierre Trudeau
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I think it's good that you test the reality that surrounds you in your neighbourhood with the reality as it is in other parts of the world you come up with a better judgment. I'm not meaning that literally you can only do that and not go to school at all but in terms of enrichment of a personality I think it's a fabulous thing.
Pierre Trudeau
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When they are 50 yards from Parliament Hill, they are no longer honourable members, they are just nobodies.
Pierre Trudeau
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The federal government is the balance wheel of the federal system, and the federal system means using counterweights.
Pierre Trudeau
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Let us overthrow the totems, break the taboos. Or better, let us consider them cancelled. Coldly, let us be intelligent.
Pierre Trudeau
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The politicians, who once stated that war was too complex to be left to the generals, now act as though peace were too complex to be left to themselves.
Pierre Trudeau
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My life is one long curve, full of turning points.
Pierre Trudeau
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I think that religions must seek peace and love and therefore be pacifist.
Pierre Trudeau