Canadians Quotes

Let us be French as the Americans are English.

Confederation is only yet in the gristle and it will require five years more before it hardens into bone.

John A. Macdonald

You are a big country now but you still tend to feel small and fragile. If the United States gets a cold you get pneumonia.

I was brought up in southwestern Ontario where we were taught that Canadian patriotism should not withstand anything more than a five-dollar-a-month wage differential. Anything more than that and you went to Detroit.

J. K. Galbraith

You can be a French Canadian or an English Canadian but not a Canadian. We know how to live without an identity and this is one of our marvellous resources.

Marshall McLuhan

Not necessarily conscription but conscription if necessary.

William Lyon Mackenzie King

Whenever the Germans found the Canadian Corps coming into the line they prepared for the worst.

David Lloyd George

Canadian nationalism was systematically encouraged and exploited by American capital. Canada moved from colony to nation to colony.

Harold A. Innis

Ours is a sovereign nation Bows to no foreign will But whenever they cough in Washington They spit on Parliament Hill.

Of course Canadians are different. There is no malice in us. We are the family doctor whom no one has called in for consultation. We are the children of the midday who see all in the clear shallow light.

Charles Ritchie

I know that Nature designs that this whole continent not merely these thirty-six states shall be sooner or later within the magic circle of the American union.

I think a stalwart peasant in a sheepskin coat born on the soil whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations with a stout wife and a half-dozen chickens is good quality.

Clifford Sifton

The Canadian spirit is cautious observant and critical where the American is assertive.

If we can find out why the idea rather than the nation of Canada can win a growing loyalty rather than commanding it then it seems to me we shall have come very near to trapping the elusive creature the Canadian Identity.

George Woodcock

Beneath their work the moral core of Canadian nationhood is found in the fact that Canada is a monarchy and in the nature of monarchial allegiance. As America is united at bottom by the covenant Canada is united at the top by allegiance. Because Canada is a nation founded on allegiance and not on compact there is no pressure for uniformity there is no Canadian way of life. Any one French Irish Ukrainian or Eskimo can be a subject of the Queen and a citizen of Canada without in any way changing or ceasing to be himself.

If ever Confederation fails it will not be because Quebec - the political voice of French Canada - has separated from it. It will be because the way to keep Quebec in it has not been found.

When the white man came we had the land and they had the bibles. Now they have the land and we have the bibles.

Chief Dan George

We shall be Canadians first foremost and always and our policies will be decided in Canada and not dictated by any other country.

John G. Diefenbaker

The situation is one something like living with your wife. Sometimes it is difficult and even irritating to live with her but it is always impossible to live without her.

The Ottawa river flows out of Protestant Ontario into Catholic Quebec.

The twentieth century belongs to Canada.

Wilfrid Laurier

We often say that we fear no invasion from the south but the armies of the south have already crossed the border - American enterprise American capital is taking rapid possession of our mines and our water power our oil areas and our timber limits.

Sara Jeannette Duncan

The Canadian dialect of English . . . seems roughly to be the result of applying British syntax to an American vocabulary.

Lister Sinclair

The habitant is the true Canadian for he has no other country.

Ramsay Traquair

The immigrant who comes to Canada really sees the country much more as a whole. He doesn't know the nuances which are so important and so dearly beloved by the Torontonian or the Montrealer.

Give us men to match our mountains Give us men to match our plains: Men with empires in their purpose And new eras in their brains.

Ottawa is a city where nobody lives though some of us may die there.

Michael Macklem

Canada was settled in the main by people with a lower middle-class outlook and a respect rather than an affectionate familiarity for the things of the mind.

Robertson Davies

The trouble with this whole country is that it's divided up into little puddles with big fish in each one of them.

Historically a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.

Northrop Frye nobody

belongs anywhere even the Rocky Mountains are still moving.

George Bowering

My father spoke French with a Bank of Montreal accent.

Hartland de Montarville Molson

If a player continues transgressing the rules his side shall lose him.

Anonymous

That one never asks a question unless he knows the answer is basic to parliamentary questioning.

John G. Diefenbaker

Love Canada or give it back.

Indian saying in Saskatchewan

The Americans are our best friends - whether we like it or not.

Robert Thompson

Scenery here in Canada is by the mile whereas in England it is by the foot. In England there is a great wealth of 'pretty bits'. In Canada there is a great lack of them. But there are grandeur vastness and expansive views.

A. Brooker Klugh

Canada's climate is nine months winter and three months late in the fall.

Evan Esar

The Canadian is often a baffled man because he feels different from his British kindred and his American neighbours sharply refused to be lumped together with either of them yet cannot make plain his difference.

He wants to be different from everyone else and daydreams of winning the global race Parents unmarried and living abroad relatives keen to bag the estate schizophrenia not excluded will he learn to grow up before it's too late?

To be Canadian is to live in relative calm and with great dignity.

John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced.

Anthony Burgess

Canadians have been accustomed to define themselves by saying what they are not.

William Kilbourn

I know that through the grace of God I am the founder of Manitoba.

Actually when it comes to knocking the Canadian cultural scene nobody outdoes Canadians myself included. We are veritable masters of self-deprecation.

Mordecai Richler

Canadians are generally indistinguishable from Americans and the surest way of telling the two apart is to make the observation to a Canadian.

Richard Staines

A Torontonian is a man who leaves culture to his wife.

Toronto has no social classes - only the Masseys and the masses.

TheSc ots are the backbone of Canada. They are all right in their three vital parts - head heart and haggis.

Listen your Lordship I'm a respecter of institutions. Even in Paris I remained a Canadian. I puffed hashish but I didn't inhale.

Mordecai Richler

One man out of every five who lands on our shores is a foreigner- i.e. non-Anglo-Saxon. He comes here with a foreign tongue foreign ideals foreign religion with centuries of ignorance and oppression behind him often bringing with him problems that the best statesmen of Europe have failed to solve.

Sir John A. Macdonald

Canadian politics in British Columbia is an adventure on the Prairies a cause in Ontario a business in Quebec a religion in the Maritimes a disease.

Paul St. Pierre

(Canada) - the most parochial nationette on earth ... I have been living in this sanctimonious icebox ... painting portraits of the opulent Methodists of Toronto. Methodism and money in this city have produced a sort of hell of dullness.

When I stand on a street in a Canadian city and look across the street it couldn't be anywhere but Canada but how can I prove it?

Newfoundland is a great English ship moored near the Banks during the fishing season for the convenience of the English fishermen.

The land too poor for any other crop is best for raising men.

R. Pocock

I want history to jump on Canada's spine with sharp skates.

Is heaven more beautiful than the country of the muskox in summer when sometimes the mist blows over the lakes and sometimes the water is blue and the loons cry very often?

Much will have to change in Canada if the country is to stay the same.

Abraham Rotstein

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