Margaret Atwood Quotes

The tar sands has changed Canada in the same way the fur trade has changed Canada.

[Opposing Hydro-Quebec:] It is always us who are asked to pay. You say, "move over, move over Indian," and the only time you'll come to talk to us is when you want something.

The American land was more like a widow than a virgin. Europeans did not find a wilderness here; rather, however involuntarily, they made one.

Why did they pick the [Indian] Reservations to lay down their pipeline? They were probably thinking the indigenous people were not going to stand up.

The great problems of the Twentieth century will have immediate relation to the discoveries of America, of Africa, and of Australia.

Canada is the only country founded on the relentless pursuit of the rodent.

Unfortunately, fur is still flying off the racks. It's a billion dollar industry.

At an ever accelerating rate we are now squandering the capital of metallic ores and fossil fuels accumulated in the earth’s crust during hundreds of millions of years. How long can this spending spree go on?

Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, 1793

Canada is encompassed by many powerful Colonies of English who labor incessantly to ruin it by exciting all our Indians, and drawing them away with their peltries for which said English give them a great deal more merchandise than the French.

Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples. French-Canadians consumed by self-pity; the descendants of Scots who fled the Duke of Cumberland; Irish, the famine; and Jews, the Black Hundreds. Then there are the peasants from Ukraine, Poland, Italy and Greece, convenient to grow wheat and dig out the ore and swing the hammers and run the restaurants, but otherwise to be kept in their place. Most of us are huddled tight to the border, looking into the candy store window, scared of the Americans on one side and of the bush on the other

The verdict is for the trumpeter swan and against the army. The army will have to find another nesting place.

We knocked the Twightwies and Chictaghicks on the head because they had cut down the trees of peace which were the limits of our country. They had hunted beavers on our land and killed them all, both male and female.

The break with and the rejection of Europe, decisive in the making of the American people, did not take place in Canada. In the formative period of Canadian history the immigrant's arrival in North America represented not a rejection of Europe and its values but an affirmation of them. This is the deepest and most meaningful difference between Canada and the United States.

Many years ago, I was in a Broadway show and I had to wear a fox fur around my shoulders. One day my hand touched one of the fox's legs. It seemed to be in two pieces. Then it dawned on me.... her leg had probally been snapped in two by the steel trap that had caught it.

We have grown up in a culture thinking that our energy resources were inexhaustible and without impact.

We seem at, the present time to have arrived at the acute stage of the colonial fever which during the last three or four years has afflicted the various powers of Europe. Germany is vying with France, England with both, in the haste to seize upon “unoccupied” countries, and to establish “protectorates” – the cant diplomatic for incomplete annexation – over uncivilized peoples.

We will not tolerate being cheap labor for industrialized nations, and the purchase of our national resources to be taken abroad.

For every person in the world to reach the present U.S. level of consumption with existing technology would require four more planet earths.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

I don’t give a crap for the pup fish.

God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the seas…. God said “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It’s yours.”

Pollution is nothing but resources we're not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.

Scientists themselves readily admit that they do not fully understand the consequences of our many-faceted assault upon the interwoven fabric of atmosphere, water, land and life in all its biological diversity. But things could also turn out to be worse than the current scientific best guess. In military affairs, policy has long been based on the dictum that we should be prepared for the worst case. Why should it be so different when the security is that of the planet and our long-term future?

As a nation we have not yet come to have a proper respect for the forest and to regard it as an indispensable part of our resources—one which is easily destroyed but difficult to replace; one which confers great benefits while it endures, but whose disappearance is accompanied by a train of evil consequences not readily foreseen and positively irreparable.