Lester B. Pearson Quotes
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It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world.
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Not only did he [Dean Acheson] not suffer fools gladly, he did not suffer them at all.
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A great gulf, however, has been opened between man's material advance and his social and moral progress, a gulf in which he may one day be lost if it is not closed or narrowed.
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As we enter our centennial year we are still a young nation, very much in the formative stages. Our national condition is still flexible enough that we can make almost anything we wish of our nation. No other country is in a better position than Canada to go ahead with the evolution of a national purpose devoted to all that is good and noble and excellent in the human spirit.
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We are all descendants of Adam, and we are all products of racial miscegenation.
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How can there be peace without people understanding each other; and how can this be if they don't know each other?
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Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.
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We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it.
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As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between the man in and the man out of uniform.
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Of all our dreams today there is none more important - or so hard to realise - than that of peace in the world. May we never lose our faith in it or our resolve to do everything that can be done to convert it one day into reality.
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Understanding the nature of conflict leads to peace.
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If a man has an apartment stacked to the ceiling with newspapers, we call him crazy. If a woman has a trailer house full of cats, we call her nuts. But when people pathologically hoard so much cash that they impoverish the entire nation, we put them on the cover of Fortune magazine and pretend that they are role models.
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This fastest of all games [hockey] has become almost as much of a national svmbol as the maple leaf.
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Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.
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It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.
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No state, furthermore, unless it has aggressive military designs such as those which consumed Nazi leaders in the thirties, is likely to divert to defense any more of its resources and wealth and energy than seems necessary.
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Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe.
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The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states.
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Whether we live together in confidence and cohesion; with more faith and pride in ourselves and less self-doubt and hesitation; strong in the conviction that the destiny of Canada is to unite, not divide; sharing in cooperation, not in separation or in conflict; respecting our past and welcoming our future.
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The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.
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As to the first, I do not know that I have done very much myself to promote fraternity between nations but I do know that there can be no more important purpose for any man's activity or interests.
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Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way.
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I have worked in a very close and cordial way with Norwegian representatives at many international meetings, and the pleasure I felt at those associations was equaled only by the profit I always secured from them.
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And I have lived since - as you have - in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.
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The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.
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As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.
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We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side. Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction.
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When you're special to a cat, you're special indeed, she brings to you the gift of her preference of you, the sight of you, the sound of your voice, the touch of your hand.
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The scientific and technological discoveries that have made war so infinitely more terrible for us are part of the same process that has knit us all so much more closely together.
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The best defence of peace is not power, but the removal of the causes of war, and international agreements which will put peace on a stronger foundation, than the terror of destruction.
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Lester B. Pearson
- Born: April 23, 1897
- Died: December 27, 1972
- Occupation: Former Prime Minister of Canada
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