Liberals don't want any part of Canada left behind. I used to give speeches on and on and on about the fact that we don't want to have a country where you think, "my kids have got to move to the city if they're going to have any kind of future." We've been saying that, and we've not got through.

Public service does not necessarily mean service in the House of Commons, and public service is not synonymous with partisan political activity. It comes in a thousand colours, but the common denominator is: it's not about me - it's about we.

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.

The party's got to see itself as being one public service organization in a very competitive field, all of whom are competing for the allegiance and commitment and brains of the next generation. They've got to be big enough to reach out to those groups and say "come on in."

Family traditions are more than arguments with the dead, more than collections of family letters you try to decipher. A tradition is also a channel of memory through which fierce and unrequited longings surge, longings that define and shape a whole life.

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.

The Liberal Party of Canada has no monopoly on public service, we have no monopoly on virtue, and we have no monopoly on wisdom.