Lawyers From Canada

"Music trains the mind, like mathematics, or logic, to precision of mind."

"Devin had never trusted the priests of Eanna in his whole life. They were too shrewd, by far the most subtle of the clergy, by far the most apt to steer events to their own ends, which might lie out of sight, generations away. Servants of a goddess, he supposed, might find it easier to take the longer view of things. But everyone knew that all across the peninsula the clergy of the Triad had their own triple understanding with the Tyrants from abroad: their collective silence, their tacit complicity, bought in exchange for being allowed to preserve the rites that mattered more to them, it seemed, than freedom in the Palm."

"A reminder of what it was to be mortal and so doomed to tread one road only and that one only once...We can never truly know the path we have not walked."

"When power is gone the memory of power lingers."

"It was true, it was all true. But none of it was the truth."

"As somebody who understands the pervasive evil of apartheid, to say 'Israel is an apartheid state' is not only false and prejudicial to Israel, but it undermines the real struggle against apartheid and the integrity of that movement."

"My parents taught me that an NDPer in Alberta has to work three times harder than any other politician to earn votes. It's a lesson I won't forget."

"Tonight, I also want to say that I'm also thinking about my mother and father. I know my mother would be completely over the moon about this. I think my dad would too. I'm sorry he couldn't see this. This really was his life’s work but I can say this: I know how proud he'd be of the province we all love."

"The decline in natural-gas revenues has been dramatic and the degree to which we are dependent on oil revenues, it is time for us to consider an increase in corporate and personal tax."

"On behalf of my countrymen, I join you in mourning the death of your distinguished predecessor, the former Governor-General. Canada has lost one of its most honored citizens and the United States, a valued friend. Vincent Massey was a wise and eloquent statesman, and we in the United States were especially honored by his service as the first Minister of Canada."

"It was Prime Minister Laurier who said of Canada's differing components: "I want the marble to remain the marble; I want the granite to remain the granite; I want the oak to remain the oak." This has been the Canadian way. As a result, Canadians have helped to teach the world, as Governor-General Massey once said, that the "toleration of differences is the measure of civilization." Today, more than ever before, we need to apply that understanding to the whole range of world affairs. And to begin with, we must apply it to our dealings with one another."

"It would be foolish and wrong to ignore the fact that all our universities today tread a very dangerous path. Increasingly, they are accepting government money because they are doing things that government wants done. How great a peril is this in a democracy?"

"Old wives' tales are not enough in a day when old wives and old men, too, are constantly moving away from their labours."

"History is the necessary food of good and noble sentiments. It ought to give us at once humility and confidence in the face of greatness."

"How great a quality is horse sense! Someone has defined it as that something which keeps horses from betting on men!"

"Canada is not a melting-pot. Canada is an association of peoples who have, and cherish, great differences but who work together because they can respect themselves and each other."

"Technology has been defined, perhaps a little ungenerously, as "a long Greek name for a bag of tools"."

"We must pass through the barriers of language and race, of geography and religion, of custom and tradition and we must build on a common foundation."

"The neglect of the humanities in present-day education is doubtless not a cause but a symptom of an age."

"Truth must the guide of those who hold the power; but humility is their sign, the promise that their privileges are in safe hands."

"The great menace of civilization in the present is that we offer an education with too little regard for the roots."

"In fact, in the far North one sees the northern lights facing south!"

"We can best serve the cause of Canadian unity and understanding by living first in and through and then beyond our own immediate traditions."

"In opening and conquering a country great and wild and rich - a country indeed not yet fully known or conquered - we have still to learn more about ourselves and each other."

"I have had what might be called a post graduate course in the most important subject for all Canadians - Canada itself."

"The age which we live in is not suited to idle complacency or to pleasant dreams of past greatness."

"Rational comprehension of the universe is not enough. We must call to our aid not merely reason, but the vision and the spiritual insight of the ages. These things we must seek."

"We are not born of the passions of war or of the fervours of revolution. And we grew quietly into the realization that, set as we are in a great wide land, with all our differences, there are certain traditions and ideals which we had in common, and which could best be preserved in a distinct society of our own."

"This visit "north of 60" was to complete what might be called at least a preliminary survey. I arrived here and realized that my survey had hardly begun."

"It is worthy of notice that many of this generation, fed on text-books, on anthologies and on abstracts, cannot read."

"It is the University's function to turn out well-balanced persons with an understanding of themselves and of their place in life."

"Corporations have no internal constraints to stop them from flouting the law. Their legal makeup compels them to pursue profit and growth but say nothing about whether they have to abide by the law in doing so. As a result, decisions to break the law depend, as do all others, on whether the benefits outweigh the costs."

"[...] legal curbs on corporate freedoms are needed to protect citizen's freedom."

"The corporation is not an independent "person" with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy."

"Deregulation freed corporations from legal constraints, and privatization empowered them to govern areas of society from which they had been previously been excluded. By the end of the century, the corporation had become the world's dominant institution. Yet history humbles dominant institutions."

"The corporation was originally conceived as a public institution whose purpose was to serve national interests and advance the public good."

"These are the elements of an emerging order that may prove to be as dangerous as any fundamentalism that history has produced. For in a world where anything or anyone can be owned, manipulated, and exploited for profit, everything and everyone will be."

"As a psychopathic creature, the corporation can neither recognize nor act upon moral reasons to refrain from harming others."

"The corporation, like the psychopathic personality it resembles, is programmed to exploit others for profit."

"Dodge v. Ford still stands for the legal principal that managers and directors have a legal duty to put the shareholders' interests above all others and no legal authority to serve any other interests - what has come to be known as "the best interests of the corporation" principal."

"By leveraging their freedom from the bonds of location, corporations could now dictate the economic policy of governments."

"Corporations now govern society, perhaps more than governments themselves do; yet ironically, it is their very power, much of which they have gained through economic globalization, that makes them vulnerable."

"As the corporation's size and power grew, so did the need to assuage people's fears of it. The corporation suffered its first full-blown legitimacy crisis in the wake of the early-twentieth-century merger movement, when, for the first time, many Americans realized that corporations, now turned behemoths, threatened to overwhelm their social institutions and governments."

"As institutional psychopaths, corporations are wont to remove obstacles that get into their way."

"The corporation's legally defined mandates to pursue, relentlessly and without exception, its own self interest, regardless of the often harmful consequences it might cause to others. As a result, I argue, the corporation is a pathological institution, a dangerous possessor of the great power it wields over people and societies."

"The notion that business and government are and should be partners is ubiquitous, unremarkable, and repeated like a mantra by leaders in both domains. It seems a compelling and innocuous idea - until you think about what it really means."

"The genius of the corporation as a business form, and the reason for its remarkable rise over the last three centuries , was - and is - its capacity to combine the capital, and thus the economic power, of unlimited numbers of people."

"A century and a half after its birth, the modern business corporation, an artificial person made in the image of a human psychopath, now is seeking to remake real people in its image."

"For me, pepper, I put it on my plate."

"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."