Lester B. Pearson Quotes

How can there be peace without people understanding each other; and how can this be if they don't know each other?

The best defence of peace is not power, but the removal of the causes of war, and international agreements which will put peace on a stronger foundation, than the terror of destruction.

The only failures are those who fail to try.

As a soldier, I survived World War I when most of my comrades did not.

We must keep on trying to solve problems, one by one, stage by stage, if not on the basis of confidence and cooperation, at least on that of mutual toleration and self-interest.

Understanding the nature of conflict leads to peace.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

It has too often been too easy for rulers and governments to incite man to war.

We are all descendants of Adam, and we are all products of racial miscegenation.

Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.

Diplomacy is letting someone else have your way.

When you're special to a cat, you're special indeed, she brings to you the gift of her preference of you, the sight of you, the sound of your voice, the touch of your hand.

As to the first, I do not know that I have done very much myself to promote fraternity between nations but I do know that there can be no more important purpose for any man's activity or interests.

This fastest of all games [hockey] has become almost as much of a national svmbol as the maple leaf.

We'll jump off that bridge when we come to it.

The grim fact is that we prepare for war like precocious giants, and for peace like retarded pygmies.

Today the predatory state, or the predatory group of states, with power of total destruction, is no more to be tolerated than the predatory individual.

Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.

A great gulf, however, has been opened between man's material advance and his social and moral progress, a gulf in which he may one day be lost if it is not closed or narrowed.

As a civilian during the Second War, I was exposed to danger in circumstances which removed any distinction between the man in and the man out of uniform.

Not only did he [Dean Acheson] not suffer fools gladly, he did not suffer them at all.

Every state has not only the right but the duty to make adequate provision for its own defense in the way it thinks best, providing it does not do so at the expense of any other state.

We know now that in modern warfare, fought on any considerable scale, there can be no possible economic gain for any side. Win or lose, there is nothing but waste and destruction.

The scientific and technological discoveries that have made war so infinitely more terrible for us are part of the same process that has knit us all so much more closely together.

I am grateful for the opportunities I have been given to participate in that work as a representative of my country, Canada, whose people have, I think, shown their devotion to peace.

Misunderstanding arising from ignorance breeds fear, and fear remains the greatest enemy of peace.