Jean Chrétien

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

"Theres 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."

"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."

"I never bought into the Laffer curve, a theory, named after an American supply-side economist who had been an adviser to the Reagan administration, that essentially argues that a government will increase its revenue by reducing its taxes. If it were that easy, everybody would do it. What politician doesnt want to reduce taxes in order to win votes? Taken to its logical extreme, the Laffer curve makes no sense because, if you lower your taxes to zero, how are you going to get higher revenues? In practice, every government that toyed with this theory ended up with larger deficits, higher interest rates and greater social inequality."

"It is not the governments purpose to make a profit the way a company does, because a company doesnt have to give a damn about the unemployed poor or provide services that are non-commercial by definition."

"To be frank, politics is about wanting power, getting it, exercising it, and keeping it."

"Politics is a game of friends."

"Most Canadians dont understand the House of Commons. They turn on their televisions, see us yelling at one another, and dismiss us as a bunch of fools."

"A successful politician must not only be able to read the mood of the public, he must have the skill to get the public on his side. The public is moved by mood more than logic, by instinct more than reason, and that is something that every politician must make use of or guard against"

"A man cant ask for much more than the chance to make a difference in his chosen field of work. Politics is my vocation. Im forever grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this great country of ours. I know I am a better person for it."

"Its 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 its another thing to take a letter from an Indian boy studying at the University of Ottawa to his mother in Old Crow."

"The two of us had come a long way together from our humble beginnings and the basement apartment that had been our first home as newlyweds in 1957, when I was still a law student at Laval University in Quebec City."