All Quotes

"In his play, Fischer was amazingly objective, long before computers stripped away so many of the dogmas and assumptions humans have used to navigate the game for centuries. Positions that had been long considered inferior were revitalized by Fischer’s ability to look at everything afresh. His concrete methods challenged basic precepts, such as the one that the stronger side should keep attacking the forces on the board. Fischer showed that simplification—the reduction of forces through exchanges—was often the strongest path as long as activity was maintained. The great Cuban José Capablanca had played this way half a century earlier, but Fischer’s modern interpretation of “victory through clarity” was a revelation. His fresh dynamism started a revolution; the period from 1972 to 1975, when Fischer was already in self-exile as a player, was more fruitful in chess evolution than the entire preceding decade. Despite the ugliness of his decline, Fischer deserves to be remembered for his chess and for what he did for chess. A generation of American players learned the game thanks to Fischer and he should continue to inspire future generations as a model of excellence, dedication, and achievement. There is no moral at the end of the tragic fable, nothing contagious in need of quarantine. Bobby Fischer was one of a kind, his failings as banal as his chess was brilliant."

"Mr Fischer is a fugitive from justice"

"All women love a good geek, and those who tell you otherwise are lying."

"Canada is today the most successful pluralist society on the face of our globe, without any doubt in my mind... That is something unique to Canada. It is an amazing global human asset."

"Canada has an experience of governance of which much of the world stands in dire need. It is a world of increasing dissension and conflict in which a significant contribution is the failure of different ethnic, tribal, religious, or social groups to search for, and agree upon, a common space for harmonious co-existence."

"Canada has for many years been a beacon to the rest of the world for its commitment to pluralism and for its support for the multicultural richness and diversity of its peoples"

"I was born in Canada and I'm Canadian... I grew up in Canada."

"Canada acceding to this confederation, and adjoining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this Union; but no other colony shall be admitted into the same, unless such admission be agreed to by nine States."

"[W]hen Canada's having its way with you, you know something's gone horribly wrong."

"If aliens invaded Quebec, the U.S. press would give it two inches in the entertainment section."

"The Canadian game is rigged, and has been from the start."

"Oh God! Oh Montreal!"

"...Right here in Canada, white Canadians have violated the rights of Indigenous peoples in more ways than we can count. One of the most heinous abuses against Indigenous women is forced sterilization, where white Canadians violated Indigenous women's bodies to make it impossible for them to conceive and become mothers....This is genocide. This abuse of human rights is not something of the past. White Canadians have forcibly sterilized Indigenous women just within the past few years in 2017...In the 1960s and 1970s, the federal government learned how expensive it would be to build accessible health services in the north. So instead of building, the federal government decided that these isolated Indigenous women should use birth control, even though birth control was illegal at the time...They broke their own laws because they did not value accessible and safe healthcare for Indigenous peoples...The right to choice must also include human rights and dignity of Indigenous peoples, with whom we live amongst on stolen land....If you believe in the right to choice, for the right to legal and safe abortions, then you must also fight for bodily autonomy for black persons....We have a shameful history in how we have treated black persons. Human rights and bodily autonomy were violated at the hands of White colonists during slavery. black people were auctioned off while chained and likely naked, forced to carry a fetus to term, and were sterilized, all of course without their consent.....Our fight for right to choice must consider the histories of abuses and inequalities, of White bodies controlling vulnerable and marginalized bodies, of White bodies controlling who is vulnerable and is who is marginalized...Your fight for bodily autonomy must be all-inclusive. If your fight for human rights are not universal, it is self serving and it allows unjust harm onto vulnerable and marginalized peoples. One should have full control over their body. Our body. Our choice...."

"Do I do business with Canadian racketeers? I don't even know what street Canada is on."

"Canada's use of the term "visible minorities" to identify people it considers susceptible to racial discrimination came under fire at the United Nations Wednesday - for being racist."

"And slowly, very slowly, the gorgeous dream grows bright, Where rise the four democracies of Anglo-Saxon might; The Republic, fair, alone; The Commonwealth, new-grown; The proud, reserved Dominion, with a story of her own, And One that shall emerge at length from travail war, and blight."

"Today, I see representatives from every part of Canada — from St. John's, Newfoundland and Labrador, to Victoria, British Columbia, and Arviat, Nunavut. I see the guardians of the fundamental rights and freedoms guaranteed in the Canadian Charter and, as King, I thank you for your service to your fellow Canadians, across the length and breadth of this vast and great nation. You speak for your communities, representing an incredible richness of cultures, languages and perspectives. We owe it to this generation, and those who succeed us, to think and act for the greater good of all. While the world faces unprecedented challenges, generating uncertainties across the continents with regards to peace and stability, economics and climate change, your communities have the skills and determination to bring a wealth of solutions."

"Once when I was Prime Minister, I came back from an international conference, and I set foot in Canada... To me, there, I said: Chrétien, you've got the easiest job of all these guys there, from all round the globe. Original: Quand j'étais premier ministre, pis je revenais d'une conférence internationale, pis je mettais le pied au Canada ... À moi, là, je dis : Chrétien, tu as la job la plus facile de tous ces gars-là alentour du globe."

"Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how.Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, and American culture."

"66 per cent of the average monthly income to make payments on the average single-detached Canadian house"

"We are a nation of immigrants, and not happy in our minds."

"Canada is a country that works better in practice than in theory."

"A few years ago I had to answer some searching questions to a Customs official about a book which I had with me, printed in Latin, and which the official suspected to be Russian; it was a jestbook, as a matter of fact, and I was so foolish as to say so, forgetting that a Latin joke is as strange to the modern imagination as a unicorn or an amphisbaena."

"One receives the impression from his writings that he made it his plan to read any book whatever that no one else can bear to read."

"It would certainly be better if a writer like Leacock knew always what was best to do and what would look best in the eyes of posterity, but such unnatural foresight cannot be required of any man."

"Complementary to his is Thurber's remark that "humour is a kind of emotional chaos, told about quietly and calmly in retrospect". Emotional chaos is not pleasant; distillation of that chaos afterward may perhaps be pleasant in some of its aspects, and undoubtedly gives pleasure to others."

"The search for the sense of humour is as fruitless and as enduring as the hunt for the unicorn; the really wise man knows that the unicorn, being no reality but a life-enhancing myth, must never be hunted, and may only be glimpsed by the well-disposed and the lucky; it cannot be captured, and it is encountered only by indirection."

"But the temptation to wallow and disport myself in the purple prose of the doting collector is strong, and it will need all my vigilance to resist it."

"There are great numbers of people to whom the act of reading a book — any sort of book — is wondrous; they speak of the reader in the tone of warm approbation which they use otherwise when referring to pregnant women, or the newly dead."

"And how often do we meet the man who prefaces his remarks with: "I was reading a book last night..." in the too loud, overenunciated fashion of one who might be saying: "I keep a hippogryph in my basement." Reading confers status."

"But not to be acquainted with what is happening in literary France is to feel disgraced, and in the pecking order of literary criticism a Frenchman can humiliate an Englishman just as readily as an Englishman can humiliate an American, and an American a Canadian. One of Canada's most serious literary needs at present is some lesser nation to domineer over and shame by displays of superior taste."

"It was suggested by the late Alfred Knopf that books should be graded like eggs, and that publishing houses should not offer as First Class what they well know to be Fifth. But of course publishers cannot agree about standards for grading, and even if they could, writers would shriek like mandrakes uprooted if their work were sent into the world marked anything less than Strictly Fresh."

"Any enjoyment or profit we get from life, we get Now; to kill Now is to abridge our own lives."

"There are, one presumes, tone-deaf readers."

"I feel that what is wrong with scores of modern novels which show literary quality, but which are repellent and depressing to the spirit is not that the writers have rejected a morality, but that they have one which is unexamined, trivial, and lopsided. They have a base concept of life; they bring immense gusto to their portrayals of what is perverse, shabby, and sordid, but they have no clear notion of what is Evil; the idea of Good is unattractive to them, and when they have to deal with it, they do so in terms of the sentimental or the merely pathetic. Briefly, some of them write very well, but they write from base minds that have been unimproved by thought or instruction. They feel, but they do not think. And the readers to whom they appeal are the products of our modern universal literacy, whose feeling is confused and muddled by just such reading, and who have been deluded that their mental processes are indeed a kind of thought."

"Bookes give no wisdom where none was before, But where some is, there reading makes it more."

"We all have slumbering realms of sensibility which can be coaxed into wakefulness by books."

"I do not trust any advice which is given in bad prose."

"Long toil and short leisure are part of the heavy price we pay for our North American standard of living. It is reputed to be the highest in the world, and so it should be, for it is bought at an inordinate price."

"There is no democracy in the world of intellect, and no democracy of taste."

"As for an afterlife, there has been a general decline in the general acceptance of it as a certainty, and though a few rationalists may be pleased, to many people this has added a new terror to death. We are reluctant, in the main, to consider the disappearance of ourselves and consequently all we feel and know. Every man's death is, literally, the end of a world if he dies without hope. We have exchanged Gone Elsewhere for Gone Nowhere."

"Do they show us the future as it matures in the womb of the present?"

"Poetry which has decided to do without music, to divorce itself from song, has thrown away much of its reason for being..."

"The true realist is he who believes in both God and the Devil, and is prepared to attempt, with humility, to sort out some corner of the extraordinary tangle of their works which is our world. He cannot use his feeling alone, he must use his intellect."

"We live in a world where bulk is equated with quality."

"In an age where public health has never been better provided for, and medical men enjoy a respect formerly reserved for the aristocracy and the clergy, millions of people are unwell, or merely feel unwell, or are in dread lest at some future time they may become unwell."

"Prayer is petition, intercession, adoration, and contemplation; great saints and mystics have agreed on this definition. To stop short at petition is to pray only in a crippled fashion. Further, such prayer encourages one of the faults which is most reprehended by spiritual instructors — turning to God without turning from Self."

"Thought and reason, unless matched by feelings, are empty, delusive things."

"The climate of his mind is so salubrious, so invigorating, that dull thoughts and heavy cares are dispelled by contact with it. And is not this the true end of scholarship? It is to make us wise, of course, but what is the use of being wise if we are not sometimes merry? The merriment of wise men is not the uninformed, gross fun of ignorant men, but it has more kinship with that than the pinched, frightened fun of those who are neither learned nor ignorant, gentle nor simple, bound nor free. The idea that a wise man must be solemn is bred and preserved among people who have no idea what wisdom is, and can only respect whatever makes them feel inferior."

"The day has long passed when a university degree was a guarantee of experience in the humanities, or of literacy beyond its barest meaning of being able, after a fashion, to read and write."