Pierre Berton Quotes

My best advice to writers is get yourself born in an interesting place.

Racism is a refuge for the ignorant. It seeks to divide and to destroy. It is the enemy of freedom, and deserves to be met head-on and stamped out.

I am an atheist, a rationalist and a humanist.

The concept of barroom shoot-outs and duels in the sun have no part in our tradition either, possibly because we have had so few barrooms and so little sun. (It is awkward to reach efficiently for a six-gun while wearing a parka and two pairs of mittens.)

I only write books about dead people. They can't sue.

. . .(W)e are Canadians and not Americans because of a foolish war that scarcely anyone wanted or needed, but which, once launched, no one knew how to stop.

The more I see of the country, the less I feel I know about it. There is a saying that after five years in the north every man is an expert; after ten years, a novice.

I was hated, you know. I made no secret of the fact that I was an atheist. People told me there are no atheists in fox holes. That's nonsense. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]

On September 9, the day after Prevost’s armistice ends, Napoleon launches and, at great cost, wins the Battle of Borodino, thus opening the way to Moscow. The casualties on that day exceed eighty thousand—a figure greater than the entire population, of Upper Canada.

Who, in Europe, can take this bloodless colonial fracas seriously? On September 9, the day after Prevost’s armistice ends, Napoleon launches and, at great cost, wins the Battle of Borodino, thus opening the way to Moscow. The casualties on that day exceed eighty thousand—a figure greater than the entire population, of Upper Canada.

According to accepted newspaper clichés, we all go down fighting. The other day I even read that an 18-month-old baby had died after a long battle with cancer. That has become the mandatory phrase for all who expire, disease-ridden. They battled valiantly; they lost. When I finally depart I hope somebody will write, instead, that I died after a long battle with life.

I have worked. I don’t think I ever had a job that was only eight hours a day. I worked for fifty-six years. I never lost a day’s work in all those years. I was determined that I would never lose my family. I would work twenty hours a day if necessary to overcome it; which I did. The Depression helped me because it gave me that determination that I had to go ahead and work.

My TV show enraged people. I had prostitutes on, and I treated them like real people.... I was fired from Maclean's after I wrote a piece called 'Let's Stop Hoaxing The Kids About Sex'. Now I'm the 'beloved author,' the 'beloved historian of Canada,' an icon. I get standing ovations.... I never set out to be a patriot or a popular historian. I just liked storytelling. [interview promoting Marching as to War (2002)]

Born in 1916 and named for the bloodiest battle of the Great War, Clark was one of a family of five children deserted by their father, as so many were during those hard times. As a result, he was determined that what had happened to his family would never happen to his own children. Clark could never forget the times when food was so scarce that he would go down to the St. Lawrence Market to shoot pigeons off the rafters so that his mother could make a pigeon pie for dinner. He could never forget the little store at the corner of Queen and Augusta where Cooper the butcher would cock an eye at him and ask: “How’s your dog, Vern?” Both knew there was no dog, but Clark would reply with a straight face, “Not too bad.” And Cooper would respond with an equally straight face, “I’d better give you a few bones. I’ll give you some with a little meat on.” There were thousands of Verdun Clarks in the thirties, living on soup made from scraps dispensed by sympathetic tradesmen. That’s how people were in the Depression, generous in the midst of want. As Verdun Clark would often remark, years later, “They aren’t like the people today. There’s no comparison. No comparison.

In Upper Canada, during an emergency, individual civil liberties are not a matter of pressing concern. Individualism, after all, is an American concept, “liberty” a Yankee word.

Since the days of George III, Americans have resisted authority; Canadians, by and large, have not. And it seems to me that if Canadians from time to time have endured too much authority, you Americans have suffered from too little. If government becomes too strong, it becomes arbitrary; if it becomes too weak it can also become corrupt

Never retract, never explain, get things done and let them howl.

Ten dollars was a great deal of money in 1935 – a year in which department store seamstresses found they had to work evenings to earn the minimum weekly wage of $12.50. But for others it was a pittance. “I’m glad I grew up then. It was a good time for everybody. People learned what it means to work,” said John David Eaton.

The germs were already there in the hot, dry summer of 1929, when the crops began to fail on the southern prairies and the boom ran wild and out of hand and the country continued to overbuild on borrowed funds. The Great Depression was beginning and nobody knew it. The Great Repression was already under way but nobody cared. One did not need to visit Munich to see dissidents beaten to the ground. It was happening here.

One man came racing across the park directly toward Gray. A motorcycle officer saw him and roared after him. He tried desperately to escape, dodging between the trees, but the motorcycle followed every move until the victim tripped and fell. In an instant the policeman in the sidecar was out, kicking his victim brutally as he tried to get up. At last he simply lay on the grass, “trying to cover his head, and crying out as his body recoiled under the heavy boot.” We ask, sometimes, why the German bystanders did not interfere when the Brownshirts beat up the Jews, but deep down we know the answer. As Gray wrote, “I suppose we all had some impulse to intervene, to try to stop this cruel nonsense, but we didn’t. We weren’t after all on the wretched man’s side, except that each of us could feel the boot in his guts. Instead, we turned away sickened as the broken man was stood up and led away for questioning

In an affluent society there ought to be an income floor under every man below which society will not allow him to go – and this ought to come as a right and not as a charity.

Here, from his perch on the very summit of the mountain wall, high above forest and river, far from the tinny cacophony of Skagway, Steele, the iron man, could gaze down, godlike, on the insect figures striving to reach his eyrie—on the whimpering horses and the cursing men, and on the women bent double beneath man-sized loads. It was a scene that was almost medieval in its fervor and in its allegory, and it was enacted against a massive backdrop: the cloud-plumed mountains in the foreground, the rolling hills in the middle distance, and far below—as if in another world—the bright sheen of the ocean and the tiny outlines of shuttling boats disgorging, endlessly, more human cargo, and, glittering wetly in the pale sun, the flats of Skagway, where William Moore had once reigned as a lonely monarch. And hanging over the whole, like a encompassing pall, the sickly-sweet stench of carrion, drifting with the wind.