Pierre Trudeau Quotes

The liberty of the individual is a necessary postulate of human progress.

One of the eternal truths is that happiness is created and developed in peace, and one of the eternal rights is the individual's right to live.

People have rights and government must be kept from trampling on them.

The enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must he the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

I am a believer in liberty. That is my religion — to give to every other human being every right that I claim for myself, and I grant to every other human being, not the right — because it is his right — but instead of granting I declare that it is his right, to attack every doctrine that I maintain, to answer every argument that I may urge — in other words, he must have absolute freedom of speech.

Man should not be in the service of society, society should be in the service of man. When man is in the service of society, you have a monster state, and that's what is threatening the world at this minute.

Your rights matter, because you never know when you're going to need them.

What do we want for people? Human dignity, personal expression and fulfillment, justice, freedom.

The heart of the liberal philosophy is a belief in the dignity of the individual, in his freedom to make the most of his capacities and opportunities according to his own lights.

Each of us possesses a tangible living soul. The system has no such thing. We must not allow the system to exploit us.

It is not that you set the individual apart from society but that you recognize in any society that the individual must have rights that are guarded.

Individualism regards man-every man-as an independent, sovereign entity who possesses an inalienable right to his own life, a right derived from his nature as a rational being.

All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing the obtaining of happiness and safety.

I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

At the heart of that western freedom and democracy is the belief that the individual man...is the touchstone of value, and all society, all groups, and states, exist for that person's benefit. Therefore the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any western society.

We are all equal in the sense that no man must mean - must be - the means for the purposes of another man; but each individual is an end in itself.

So it was constantly going back and forth between these two cultures that kept raising the question, well, how important is personal freedom? And I think that has always been of interest to me.

Every person's life is theirs by right. An individual's life can and must belong only to to himself, not to any society or community, or he is then but a slave.

Personal liberty is the paramount essential to human dignity and human happiness.

A society that does not recognise that each individual has values of his own which he is entitled to follow can have no respect for the dignity of the individual and cannot really know freedom.

The liberty of the individual is the greatest thing of all, it is on this and this alone that the true will of the people can develop.

Wherever people defend the rights of the individual, I stand with them above all, over and beyond any wishes relating to how an economy should be managed or how people should govern themselves. This is a very strong commitment on my part.

Man is not made for the state; the state is made for man. To deprive man of freedom is to relegate him to the status of a thing, rather than elevate him to the status of a person. Man must never be treated as a means to the end of the state, but always as an end within himself.

I want freedom for the full expression of my personality.

Each human being has his or her own sexual identity and should be able to exercise that identity without guilt as long as they do not force that sexual identity on others.