One of the greatest feelings in life is the conviction that you have lived the life you wanted to live-with the rough and the smooth, the good and the bad-but yours, shaped by your own choices, and not someone else's.

One of the biggest divides in Canada - I said it in 2006, and I said it right through my political career - is urban-rural. Lots of parts of this country feel entirely left behind. And they're mobilized by, you know, the gun control issue.

There's a financial cost, but the only costs that are ever real are the costs of our soldiers.

The politics of personal destruction, the politics of division, the politics of fear, it's all there. It helps you to define the politics of moderation - the politics of democratic respect, the politics of hope - more clearly.

You're never really out of politics.

An intellectual may be interested in ideas and policies for their own sake, but a politician's interest is exclusively in the question of whether an idea's time has come.

Living fearlessly is not the same as never being afraid. It's good to be afraid occasionally. Fear is a great teacher.