Lester B. Pearson Quotes

24 Sourced Quotes

The life of states cannot, any more than the life of individuals, be conditioned by the force and the will of a unit, however powerful, but by the consensus of a group, which must one day include all states.

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

Lester B. Pearson
It would be especially tragic if the people who most cherish ideals of peace, who are most anxious for political cooperation on a wider than national scale, made the mistake of underestimating the pace of economic change in our modern world.

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

Lester B. Pearson
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.

Lester B. Pearson
Under this flag may our youth find new inspiration for loyalty to Canada; for a patriotism based not on any mean or narrow nationalism, but on the deep and equal pride that all Canadians will feel for every part of this good land.

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

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

Lester B. Pearson
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.

Lester B. Pearson
And I have lived since - as you have - in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.

Lester B. Pearson
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.

Lester B. Pearson
No state, furthermore, unless it has aggressive military designs such as those which consumed Nazi leaders in the thirties, is likely to divert to defense any more of its resources and wealth and energy than seems necessary.

Lester B. Pearson
To be Prime Minister of Canada, you need the hide of a rhinoceros, the morals of St. Francis, the patience of Job, the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the leadership of Napoleon, the magnetism of a Beatle and the subtlety of Machiavelli.

Lester B. Pearson
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.

Lester B. Pearson
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.

Lester B. Pearson
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.

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

Lester B. Pearson
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.

Lester B. Pearson
Not only did he not suffer fools gladly, he did not suffer them at all.
Of Dean Acheson

Lester B. Pearson
Until the last great war, a general expectation of material improvement was an idea peculiar to Western man. Now war and its aftermath have made economic and social progress a political imperative in every quarter of the globe. If we ignore this, there will be no peace. There has been a widening of horizons to which in the West we have been perhaps too insensitive. Yet it is as important as the extension of our vision into outer space.
Today continuing poverty and distress are a deeper and more important cause of international tensions, of the conditions that can produce war, than previously.

Lester B. Pearson
The chief distinction of a diplomat is that he can say no in such a way that it sounds like yes.

Lester B. Pearson
Of all our dreams today there is none more important — or so hard to realise — than that of peace in the world. May we never lose our faith in it or our resolve to do everything that can be done to convert it one day into reality.

Lester B. Pearson
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.

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

Lester B. Pearson