Top 60 Rodrigue Tremblay Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t do to others what you would not like to be done to you, if you were in their place.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

2. “The Earth can endure without humans, but humans cannot survive without planet Earth.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

3. “Wars of aggression are the most barbarous of all human endeavors and are, more often than not, the instruments of insane tyrants who hear voices.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

4. “Armed with the neoconservative doctrine of so-called ‘preventive’ wars of aggression, if it is not vigilant, the United States could be in the 21st Century, what Germany was in the 20th Century, that is, a danger to the World.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

5. “The world should be worried about those who go around the planet with a can of gasoline in one hand and a box of matches in the other, pretending to sell fire insurance.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

6. “An incompetent politician who surrounds himself with competent people can pull it off. However, if he is dumb enough to surround himself with like-minded people, failure becomes a certainty.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

7. “It is in the interest of any country to avoid giving power to idiots, to ignoramuses, incompetents, devious and delusional characters or to demagogues. If not, watch out. More countries are destroyed by their own politicians than by invading armies.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

8. “A constitution is only good as long as the people in power [politicians, judges, etc.], believe in its principles. If people in power no longer believe in its principles, they will find a way to change it or circumvent it. This is major lesson of the history of democracy: democracies do die and they are often replaced by tyrannies.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

9. “To build a compact strong enough to steer a democratic country on the path of a permanent war economy takes an alliance of interests between militarists, industrialists, politicians, sycophants and propagandists. – These are the five pillars of the military-industrial complex, as it can be found today in the United States.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

10. “It would be nothing less than scandalous for the United States of America, which was founded on humanistic and democratic principles, to attempt to replace the old empires of the past and to deny the fundamental democratic right of other peoples and other nations to self-determination.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

11. “If it is appropriate to introduce economic rationality into public debates, we must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater and make markets what they are not, what they have never been and what they will never will be, that is, perfect mechanisms for allocating resources.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

12. “Crooked politicians, when facing a quagmire of their own making, and feeling powerless and under attack, will spend unlimited amounts of public money and will sacrifice unlimited numbers of other people’s lives, in order to save face.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

13. “No other organizations, (except perhaps an army), but organized religions can mobilize large groups of people into congregations and turn them into mind-numbed automatons, all too ready to follow orders.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

14. “As an economist but also as a humanist, I believe that collectively, we must aim at creating the greatest good for the greatest number of people, not the maximizing of purely selfish personal financial objectives.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

15. “Morality and religion are not the same thing. In fact, religion is a prism that tends to skew morality in one’s favor, in one group’s favor or in one nation’s favor; often, what is good for one people is considered bad for others, and conversely.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

16. “In the long run, it is much better for a political party to be in the minority, but keeping a clear sense of what it wants to accomplish, than to be in the majority while being paralyzed by irreconcilable dissentions and condemned to do nothing.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

17. “For a people to be free, it must first prove that it deserves it.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

18. “Cemeteries are full of people with large pension funds.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

19. “The system of religions has played a central role in the evolution of the human species. It just happens that our ancestors invented the system of religions to solidify the cohesion of their communities and… to justify the killing of their enemies.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

20. “Wars are cruel gimmicks designed to enrich the few and impoverish the many.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

21. “[In economics], we have seen the emergence of a truly secular cult according to which the market is a kind of omniscient god, omnipotent and infallible, which could serve as the only collective instrument for achieving the common good and the collective interest, and that in all circumstances. It has been claimed, despite the recurrent dramatic collapses of financial markets, and some still claim that there is practically no economic problem that markets, left alone, cannot solve on their own.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

22. “Social justice and a fair economic system are prerequisites of a well functioning democracy.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

23. “As the rich often steal from the poor, it is only natural and just for the state to tax the rich to give to the poor.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

24. “Death is part of life. It is an unavoidable surrender to the overwhelming forces of nature.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

25. “The two biggest curses of humanity have been proselytizing religions and wars, and both have often been intertwined.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

26. “The American military invasion of Iraq [in 2003] to gain control over that country’s vast oil reserves could go down in history as the biggest planned heist of the 21st Century.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

27. “In economics, as in medicine, it is never too late to do the right thing.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

28. “The unrestricted use of big money in politics can turn a vibrant democracy into a decadent plutocracy, just as surely as poisoning a well can destroy a village.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

29. “Politicians sometimes forget that, once elected, they are expected to serve all the people, not just their narrow base of fanatical partisans. In that regard, their public statements are very important because they give a clue to what type of public servant the candidates will become once in power. Also, a candidate can easily self-destruct if he or she forgets that, when talking to partisans, the entire electorate is listening. Strong general statements, good or bad, remain in people’s consciousness when time comes to vote.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

30. “The fundamental purpose of life is to live it fully and as morally as possible, and to help others live their life fully and as morally as possible.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

31. “It is not faith that gives freedom; knowledge brings freedom.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

32. “The increased complexity of the global economic system over the last quarter century has had a general consequence: it has resulted in increasing the power and incomes of the CEOs of large corporations and of mega banks as never seen before, as well, to a lesser extent, of those of politicians and bureaucrats, at the expense of the less educated segments of the population and the less mobile people generally, thus weakening the democratic spirit and practices in many countries.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

33. “When all has been said and done – before the beginning we are nothing – and in the end we are nothing. It is what we do in between that counts.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

34. “No organized religion treats women, in practice, with less respect and consideration than radical Islam.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

35. “For everyone of us, there is but one way to be born, but there are a thousand ways to die.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

36. “Hell on Earth is when one has too few things... or too many.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

37. “If persons in power can do whatever they want, irrespective of due process, that country is not a democracy. It may be a royalty, an empire or a dictatorship, but it is not a democratic republic.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

38. “With the current globalization of our problems, we need to extend our circle of empathy and view humanity as a worldwide extended human family. As long as we refrain from facing that challenge, divisiveness and unsolvable conflicts will persist.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

39. “While democratic societies should have a great tolerance for an individual’s choice, they should not have a suicidal tolerance of intolerant movements that openly threaten to abolish freedom and democracy.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

40. “A government bent on controlling the people can never gather enough information on citizens, and it can be expected to use all the available techniques to obtain it.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

41. “Sometimes, one can get away with an illegal act, if it is legitimate; sometimes, one can get away with an illegitimate act, if it is legal; but, it is most difficult to get away with an act, which is both illegal and illegitimate.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

42. “The world should take notice when someone… with a fanatic mind and with powerful means, pretends to receive his marching orders from heaven.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

43. “With the current globalization of our problems, we need to extend our circle of empathy and view humanity as a worldwide extended human family. As long as we refrain from facing that challenge, divisiveness and unsolvable conflicts will persist.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

44. “Nowadays, a [U.S.] president who does not start a war abroad or who does not enlarge one already in progress is open to criticism and is likely to suffer politically. He must be seen less as a president than as a “commander-in-chief”, and even – as a de facto emperor.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

45. “Historically speaking, organized religions have often produced more demagogues and charlatans than politics.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

46. “There exists currently in the United States an unhealthy obsession with high caliber guns – a form of idolatry of the gun as a useful tool to settle differences between individuals.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

47. “It is a sad fact that even in so-called democracies, it seems that all wars are based on and sold with official lies and fraudulent fabrications in order to fool the people. Warmongers in government know that people do not like wars, especially illegal wars of aggression, against countries which have not attacked them, and that is why their first reflex is to attempt to drag the people along with lies and false pretexts for war, and by dehumanizing any potential enemy through simplistic propaganda.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

48. “The same simplistic populism, the same anti-intellectualism, the same aggressive isolationism, the same xenophobia, the same militarism, and the same scorn of international laws and institutions can be found in some segments of American politics today. Therefore, the United States could be in greater danger than many think.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

49. “Proselytizing or expansionist ideologies, such as communism, fascism, colonialism, Christianism, Islamism and Zionism, are powerful seeds of war. The more so, it seems, when one relies on the exhortations of a self-serving “holy” book. The first three ideologies nearly destroyed the Planet in the 20th century, while the last three threaten to do the same in the 21st century.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay

50. “Legally created entities such as corporations are not moral agents; only breathing individuals are; only they can adopt moral standards of conduct and be a source of law.”

— Rodrigue Tremblay