Stephen Harper Quotes

Canada appears content to become a second-tier socialistic country, boasting ever more loudly about its economy and social services to mask its second-rate status, led by a second-world strongman appropriately suited for the task.

Obviously, education is hugely important, along with healthcare. They're the basics and you're hurting your own country if you don't pour money into them.

Giving to the individual societal benefits such as free medical care breeds idleness, causing breakdown in the relationship with God.

Growth can also involve producing services instead of goods. In particular, a major expansion of public and caring services (like child care, education, elder care, and other life-affirming programs) would generate huge increases in GDP and incomes, with virtually no impact on the environment.

You and I must work together to develop our country, to get education for our children, to have doctors, to build roads, to improve or provide all day-to-day essentials.

The country that's been most successful at that is Norway. The more typical countries are those in the Middle East where a small group seizes those resources, uses it to buy arms to make sure that they can oppress the remainder, and you get these great inequalities. So Canada is among the better performing of the natural resource economies, but it's still not up to the best performing.

I want to see us build a country that is at ease with itself, a country that is confident and a country that is able and willing to build a better quality of life for all its citizens.

The issue should not be, we're going to tax you more to give you the services you want. The issue is, this is the wealthiest country in the world, and we're going to use that wealth to service human needs and not to service a military industrial corporate surveillance state.

Canada is a Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term, and very proud of it.

As we enter our centennial year we are still a young nation, very much in the formative stages. Our national condition is still flexible enough that we can make almost anything we wish of our nation. No other country is in a better position than Canada to go ahead with the evolution of a national purpose devoted to all that is good and noble and excellent in the human spirit.

We have put our country on solid ground, but let me tell you: The next five years are much, much more important. The next five years are about turning the good news in our economy into a good life for you and your family.

I am going to do my best to try to create a country in which children are not living in poverty, in which kids can go to college, in which old people have health care. Will I succeed? I can't guarantee you that, but I can tell you that from a human point of view it is better to show up than to give up.

If your Income Taxes go to help out the less fortunate, there could be no legitimate kick against it in the world. This is becoming the richest, and the poorest Country in the world. Why? Why, on account of an unequal distribution of the money.

Any country that accepts abortion is the poorest of the poor

President [Barack] Obama's staking his reelection hopes on rebuilding America's middle class. He wants higher taxes on the wealthy, tougher rules on Wall Street, and everyone else to get a fair shot to succeed. Republicans can cry "class warfare" if they want, but as the president put it today, it's about this country's welfare.

Compassion is good but politicians have turned compassion into the welfare state.

I hope that's what the taxpayers of Great Britain expect, is expect us to, when we make investments in countries, that they work. And they don't work if a nation doesn't invest in its people.

It takes a long time to turn a big country around. Just be of good cheer and keep working on it.

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?

I don't think Democrats are ever going to get excited about cutting Medicaid to pay for tax cuts to wealthy people. I just don't think that's the direction we should be going in our country. The 1 percent's doing very well in America. They don't need more help. But Medicaid does.

We must regain our vision and hope and move our country forward on an agenda of peace and justice.

The message [of Donald Trump ] is that if anybody lives in those circumstances in this country, that's something that the government should be working to try to change.

Children and dogs are as necessary to the welfare of the country as Wall Street and the railroads.

Can someone tell me, whatever we are doing, have we asked ourselves if our work has helped the poor or come to benefit the nation in any way? We should come out of the 'Why should I care' attitude and dedicate ourselves to the nation's progress.