Jean Chrétien Quotes

The art of politics is learning to walk with your back to the wall, your elbows high, and a smile on your face. It's a survival game played under the glare of lights.

Les défis qui attendent le Canada, selon Jean Chrétien, Radio-Canada Info (14 January 2025)

To my mind losing is always better than never trying, because you can never tell what may happen.

Everybody has the right to speak up in a democracy. We would be in trouble as a society if there wasn't a constant pressure to make reforms and to be just. Sometimes as prime minister, when I was caught up in a really loud demonstration, I used to say to myself that I deserved it because of all the demonstrations I myself had organized as a student against Duplessis.

Aline and I have travelled a very long, very hard road together, from our working class homes in rural Quebec to the palaces of London, Paris, Moscow, and Beijing. Politics was the route, public service the reward.

The problem was, I enjoyed Question Period too much and loved the challenge it provided. Far from being a dreaded burden, it had become an exciting part of my life; opposition members attacked me, I fought back, I won or lost or held them to draw, and the next day we did it all over again.

I learned early that business is business and politics is politics. The proof is how few important businessmen have made good politicians. They may think that they are very smart about everything because they made millions of dollars by digging a hole in the ground and finding oil, but the talent and luck needed to become rich are not the same talent and luck needed to succeed on Parliament Hill.

There's no such thing as a genius in politics, or at least I have never met one. There are only human beings, some better than others, who rise or fall on the challenges they meet.

But last night, the Conservative Party reached a new low; they tried to make fun of the way I look. God gave me a physical defect, and I've accepted that since I'm a kid. It's true, that I speak on one side of my mouth. I'm not a Tory, I don't speak on both sides of my mouth.

Vision is not political rhetoric.

Most Canadians don't understand the House of Commons. They turn on their televisions, see us yelling at one another, and dismiss us as a bunch of fools.

It's one thing for a courier service transport letters and documents from one city to another at a cost that only big business can afford; but it's another thing to take a letter from an Indian boy studying at the University of Ottawa to his mother in Old Crow.

Politics is a game of friends.

Politicians of all stripes are always in danger at looking at every problem from an abstract point of view or being briefed by officials, academics, or economists who know every science but the science of human nature.

There is nothing more nervous than a million dollars - it moves very fast, and it doesn't speak any language.