Quotes

• "You had an option, sir. You could have said, 'I am not going to do it. This is wrong for Canada, and I am not going to ask Canadians to pay the price.' You had an option, sir--to say 'no'--and you chose to say 'yes' to the old attitudes and the old stories of the Liberal Party. That sir, if I may say respectfully, that is not good enough for Canadians."
  • Speaking to John Turner during the debate before the 1984 federal election.

• "Popularity's bad for you. I avoid it like the plague.

• "Peter Newman: Go fuck yourself. Thank you. Good night."

• (On one of his cabinet ministers) "Slit her throat."

• "Your book is going to be such a bestseller because it's a colourful, astonishing story. It's absolutely unbelievable. The publishers don't have to worry about whether this thing is going to sell. The only question they're going to have to wonder about is whether they've got enough paper in the forest to print the fucking books. That's all they have to worry about. I'll tell you this, if there ain't a good book in this, there'a not a good book in Canadian history. So there you go. I don't know about other books, but boy this one's going to sell. I mean the others, you've done okay, but I'll tell you, you're going to be able to retire for sure. If this thing holds, it's going to be quite remarkable. I'd be very surprised, Peter, if by the time it's all over if there weren't two books in this thing for you. Let's let the books go out first, and then do the television."

• "I look around this room and see a room full of senators, maybe one or two judges. A Conservative government will give jobs to people in other parties only after I've been prime minister for fifteen years and can't find a single living, breathing Tory to appoint." (1983)

• "It's pretty hard to tell somebody who won 211 seats the first time out, having started way behind, and then 169 the next time out, that he can't do it a third time against Jean Chrétien, Preston Manning and Audrey McLaughlin. Give me a break."

• "Look, when I did the Free Trade Agreement, I didn't know how it was going to turn out. I thought it was the right thing to do. I believed it was the way of the future. If you looked at it in the new millenium, you would say this was so obvious that it had to be done. Without it, Canada would be small and atrophied. The Free Trade Agreement and NAFTA will be regarded one hundred years from now as a major defining moment in the evolution of Canada. The New York Times did a big article in the financial section on NAFTA and they basically said, the United States and Mexico might have a little trouble with this, but, boy, Canada sure doesn't. Canada has emerged the true winner on everything."

• "Go bang the window and see what happens -- just go test it. See that? Trudeau had the office bulletproofed. I always contended that the reason he did it was because the American embassy is right outside. They probably wanted to shoot him."

• "All this nonsense going on, the guy [Jean Chrétien] just swallows himself whole on NAFTA, nobody says a word. It's just been an awful bloody piece of business. Only a mean, dirty bastard would do something like that, or a fucking stupid one. And you know what? He's both."

On Mulroney

• "My pleasure. Good guy. Brian Mulroney, the former prime minister of Great Britain."
  • Larry King