Quotes about Quebecois

Mordecai Richler

Quebec women are treated like sows.

He was a major critic of French Quebec Separatism and some elements of French Canadian culture including his perception of sexism. His French Quebec Separatist enemies translated passages of this work into French and (some say deliberately) mistranslated this line to read: Quebec women are sows. The quotation was bandied about Canada in the original version as well as the mistranslation.

Mordecai Richler

So far as one can generalize, the most gracious, cultivated, and innovative people in this country are French Canadians. Certainly they have given us the most exciting politicians of our time: Trudeau, Levesque. Without them, Canada would be an exceedingly boring and greatly diminished place

Richler was disliked by Levesque and other French Quebec Separatists because he opposed not only separatism but special privileges for Francophiles compared with other minorities. However, he was an admirer of the French Canadians as people and Canadians and was a supporter of Trudeau—he just opposed the separatists and special privileges for them. But some French Canadians were surprised by this quotation.

Mordecai Richler

I did hold the language laws of Quebec up to ridicule because they are officious and ridiculous.

The 1977 Quebec language law decreed that all immigrants be educated in French, that all businesses transact in French, that English-named towns, rivers, and mountains be Frenchified, and that all English (or even bilingual) commercial signs be outlawed. Other minorities could only transact business in French. After great protest and ridicule the Quebec Parliament amended the law to allow French signs to contain another language provided that the font of the other language was no bigger than half that of the French.

Mordecai Richler

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

Pierre Trudeau

In Quebec, people are moved too often by passion and too little by intelligence.

Michael Ignatieff

I can't think of this country without Quebec. Je parle francais. And when I think about being a Canadian, speaking French is part of it.

Rene Levesque

We are Quebecois.

Marine Le Pen

I keep wondering who defends Quebec identity: who defends sovereignty, the right of the people to express themselves freely.

Jean Charest

Recognizing Quebec as being different, recognizing our history, recognizing our identity, has never meant a weakening of Quebec and has never been a threat to national unity.

Mordecai Richler

English-speaking Canada, far from stifling Quebec, has acted...as a committed partner, a buffer, shielding its culture from the rest of an English-speaking continent that Quebecers perceive as a threatening force.

Quebecois Quotes