Tommy Douglas Quotes

Mes amis, surveillez bien les petites gens qui ont des idées .

"My friends, watch out for the little fellow with an idea." - Tommy Douglas 1961.

I am proud that my daughter believes, as I do, that hungry children should be fed whether they are Black Panthers or White Republicans"

We are not anti-American. we do not dislike Americans though we abhor American imperialism in all its manifestations. But then, so do many Americans. Many of them have said that even more forthrightly than we have, and many of them have suffered more than any of us for their plain speaking.

I am still a little fellow. Mr. Tucker is big enough to swallow me, but if he did, he would be the strangest man in the world. He would have more brains in his stomach than he does in his head.

The speech from the throne speaks about maintaining peace - peace today, when Canadian nickel is being indirectly shipped to Ethiopia. Peace today, when Italian aeroplanes are being flown with British oil! Peace! Mr. Speaker, if this be peace it must be like the peace of the Lord - it passeth all understanding.

I suggest that the hon. gentleman may be a good corporation lawyer, but he is slipping badly in his history. The capitalist system did not produce the machine age; the machine age produced the capitalist system. The material prosperity that the world has enjoyed for the last seventy-five years or one hundred years has been due to the introduction of power; steam power, then electric power and the internal combustion engine. The capitalist system or the free enterprise system - the terms are synonymous and interchangeable - was the product of the power age. The capitalist system did not produce the power age.

Houdini used to pull rabbits out of a hat, but he never tried to make a living out of selling them when he had pulled them out of the hat

I went around to the little schoolhouses, talking like a professor, explaining our platform. We were lucky if the collection gave us enough for gas to get to the next place. We encouraged questions, and people asked us if it was true we were going to take their farms, like the Soviets in Russia, and did we believe in God.

When the war came we were shocked to find, as Mr. Thorson, the then Minister of National War Services said, that forty-six per cent of the men called were rejected because that depression had left physical and psychological scars which will never be erased from that generation.

Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege.

Will it be a great source of comfort to certain Canadian boys to know that the bullet that maimed them for life was made from Canadian nickel sold by the International Nickel Company?

To accept the principle that "all power proceeds from the barrel of a gun" is to accept a society which will be dominated by those with the biggest guns.

I felt something like the man on the resurrection morning who was reading his own tombstone and said either someone is an awful liar or I'm in the wrong hole.

Those who want to burn books are either afraid of the ideas contained within the covers or they haven't the courage to stand up for the views which they themselves profess to hold.