Maxime Bernier Quotes

Personally, I believe in self-determination, but in the context of one South Africa - so that my self-determination is based in this region, and with my people.

Our national purpose, not our party differences, must define the American Brand. We must change the conversation from one centered around what defines our differences to one that hangs a lantern on what binds us, supports our collective well being and makes us all stronger and more productive as a result.

The small elite of federal civil servants and politicians made Confederation work by acting as if the whole country was as virtuous and as they.

Parliament is not a congress of ambassadors from different and hostile interests.... Parliament is a deliberative assembly of one nation, with one interest, that of the whole—where not local purpose, not local prejudices, ought to guide, but the general good, resulting from the general reason of the whole.

The national interest is not simply the sum of our special interests and attachments.

Pluralism has run wild. We have become so blinded by the notion that there is no national interest, only special interests, that we are incapable of pursuing policies designed to be of general benefit.

No government can help the destinies of people who insist in putting sectional and class consciousness ahead of general weal.

Whoever is president, my first priority is the same - as always. I look for what's best for West Virginia and the nation as a whole.

For all the huffing and blowing we get about rugged individualism, the American spirit and the American experiment always have had at their heart the notion that the government is all of us and that, therefore, the government may keep things in trust for all of us.

Among peoples who are geographically grouped together like the peoples of Europe there must exist a sort of federal link. It is this link which I wish to endeavour to establish.

In Washington, the translation of E Pluribus Unum has been lost. The belief that we are one nation - united in purpose - caring about and for one another is no longer the practice.

We shouldn't be thinking about individuals or departments. We should be thinking about national interest. Lifting the standard of Pakistan squash is like working towards national interest.

The history of American patriotism is figuring out ways that we can work together to move forward and knit together the common government.

Then as now, whatever disagreements over policies existed among Americans - and there were many such bitter policy disputes - the purposes and goals for which Americans fought were clearly understood.

We prefer the well-being of our country over the well-being of an individual or group.

Citizen statesmanship recognizes legitimate local or special needs, but it places the national interest first.

The vice of our leading parties ... is that they do not plant themselves on the deep and necessary grounds to which they are respectively entitled, but lash themselves to fury in the carrying out of some local and momentary measure, nowise useful to the commonwealth.

Our confederacy must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North or South, is to be peopled … speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws.

Central government's such as Canada's have become too small to deal with the big global issues, yet they remain too large and distant to deal with problems of local control.

It's very dangerous ... to confuse the confuse the identity and fortune of the President with the success and fortune of the nation.

We [French Canadians] may not assimilate, we may not blend, but for all that we are still the component parts of the same country.

The motherland is the common mother, the unity within which isolated the individuals penetrate and become enmeshed. It is the holy name that expresses the voluntary fusion of all interests into one interest, of all lives into one lasting and perpetual life.

Form such a national government that we think best adapted for the good of the whole.

A country, after all, is not something you build as the pharaohs built the pyramids, and then leave standing there to defy eternity. A country is something that is built every day out of certain basic shared values.

We are such a large country that it is sometimes hard for us to realize that we are one nation, and that the interests of one part of the country, though they may be at variance with other parts, must react on each other and are therefore of interest to all men and women everywhere in the United States.