Justin Trudeau

I have been incredibly lucky all my life. I've had a family that has loved me and given me incredible opportunities. I've gone to great schools. I've travelled across the country.

When my father died, I had millions of people supporting me in a very, very difficult time. I have received so much from this country. I realize that we're defined in life not by what we get from this world but by what we have to offer it, and I know that I have a lot to offer this country, and I'm serious about devoting my life to it.

I have a very difficult, high-pressured job. Everyone knows how challenging it is to balance family responsibilities with a job that takes me across the country and working extremely hard.

I sort of locked into the idea that if I could be the perfect son to both of my parents, well maybe that would be enough to keep them together. And ultimately, obviously, it wasn't. Regardless of what I tried to do. That was a lesson about limitations.

My mother is brilliant but emotional and very much gregarious and connected to people. My father was brilliant but focused and driven and very narrow-casted.

I was a high-school teacher. I am a strong advocate for women's rights, and I'm not a woman.

I think Canadians want to get a feel for the people who will serve them... and, for me, I think that Canadians will trust people who trust them.

I trust Canadians to be able to look at the different parties, the different leaders, the plans, the teams, and make a responsible choice. And I'm very, very confident that's exactly what Canadians are going to do.

When I get out across the country and listen to people, the resentment that I see and the frustration that I see is that we have a generation of people who are fairly convinced that their kids are not going to have a better quality of life or a better future than they will.

We need the middle class to feel more confident about its prospects and about its future. We need to cut down on this anxiety that sees some people succeeding and the majority struggling - having to make choices between paying for their kids' education or saving for their own retirement.

If we wander around as politicians jumping at every shadow and desperately afraid of having our words taken out of context or attacks layered on in an unfair way, I think we're actually doing a disrespect to Canadians, to people's intelligence.

A very powerful mechanism to get elected is to play on anger and pick those wedge issues.

Nobody knows better than I do what the pressures of party leadership can do to a young family. It tore mine apart.

People still think there's sort of a debate around the Charter that politicos go into. And I get wrapped up in it, too, from time to time.

People don't believe that any politician is any different from any other one.

It's important that people understand who I am and where I come from and not just have it shaped by purely political discourse.

My father found cocktail parties challenging.

Can I actually make a difference? Can I get people to believe in politics once again? Can I get people to accept more complex answers to complex questions? I know I can. I know that's what I do very well.

My father's values and vision of this country obviously form everything I have as values and ideals. But this is not the ghost of my father running for the leadership of the Liberal party. This is me.

I trust Canadians' capacity to determine who will sit in their Parliament.

Once Canadians no longer believe that there is any good in politics, they no longer feel we can work together to solve the challenges we're facing, and that is my fundamental motivation: how do we work together as a country to solve the big challenges we're facing.

Canadians are tired of being cynical.

You can't run a government from one single person. What instead matters is that leadership be about gathering around extraordinary individuals and getting the best out of them.

I know that a prime minister of Canada needs to be deeply respectful of the other levels of government - whether it be municipal, provincial, or even nation-to-nation relationships with aboriginal governments.

I have no fears that on a purely merit basis, we will have an embarrassment of riches from which to choose in order to reach gender parity.

I remember the bad times as a succession of painful emotional snapshots: Me walking into the library at 24 Sussex, seeing my mother in tears, and hearing her talk about leaving while my father stood facing her, stern and ashen.

My idea of freedom is that we should protect the rights of people to believe what their conscience dictates, but fight equally hard to protect people from having the beliefs of others imposed upon them.

Any decision made by my father was the result of a process that had involved many voices and which sometimes had taken weeks or months.

The back and forth between the press and government is essential to any good democracy.

I don't feel that I or Canada has to prove anything through big, loud, overt acts.

My mom has always been so generous and so sensitive and so vulnerable and yet exudes so much strength.

We were able to sign free trade agreement with Europe at a time when people tend to be closing off.

We're actually able to approve pipelines at a time when everyone wants protection of the environment. We're being able to show that we get people's fears, and there are constructive ways of allaying them - and not just ways to lash out and give a big kick to the system.

I think it's always been understood that Canada is not a country that's going to stand up and beat its chest on the world stage, but we can be very helpful in modelling solutions that work.

Certainly in a world where terrorism is a daily reality in the news, it's easy for people to be afraid. But the fact is that we laid out very clearly - and Canadians get - that it's actually not a choice between either immigration or security: that of course they go together.

We know that trade, NAFTA, the free and open trade between Canada and the U.S. creates millions of good jobs on both sides of the border.

Let's not pretend we're in a global free market when it comes to agriculture. Every country protects, for good reason, its agricultural industries.

One of the things with Canada is we're of a modest enough size that we never feel that the ideal outcome of any given deal is, we win and you lose.

People in the street will either call me 'Prime Minister' or 'Justin.' We'll see how that goes. But when I'm working, when I'm with my staff in public, I'm 'Prime Minister.' I say that if we're drinking beer out of a bottle, and you can see my tattoos, you should be comfortable calling me 'Justin.'

There was a perception that I'd grown up with a silver spoon in my mouth.

Confident countries are willing to invest in the future.

We know that society is better - more prosperous, more stable, more peaceful, more cohesive - when women's rights are respected and when women are valued, empowered, and lead the way in our communities.

I'm proud to be a feminist because making sure that everyone understands we all have a role in fighting for equality is the only way to move forward.

We need to make sure we're all working together to change mindsets, to change attitudes, and to fight against the bad habits that we have as a society.

You get more diversity and creativity in your problem solving, and you end up having a much better and more representative approach to solving the challenges faced by the population you serve.

I am so proud of my family, and I am happy to give them all the limelight they want because heaven knows I got more than I need.

I am so proud to be my mother's son.

Richard Nixon made a toast to me as a future Prime Minister of Canada when I was 4 months old, sitting as a centerpiece in the middle of a table as my father had plonked me down there. It was more about politeness than any great vision.

What I was raised with in terms of a call to service was just a sense that I was lucky.

One of the reasons why Canadians are generally positively inclined towards immigration is we've seen over decades, over generations, that it works.