Top 60 Margaret Trudeau Quotes

Being bipolar is a huge exaggeration of your emotions. You can be pretty high and also terribly low, so I’ve been through it all.

I don’t think I’m marriage material, to tell you the truth. I’d be a bad choice. But I’d be darling at being a girlfriend.

I miss being exposed to the leading thinkers of the world.

The label ‘wife of the prime minister’ is like a giant signboard pointing at my head from a Monty Python sketch. But I am not Mrs. Prime Minister. I’m a human being.

The secret is to nip any mental disorder in the bud. As soon as you’re not feeling yourself, reach out and get some help because you can quickly get better. If you get stuck in it, it’s so hard to get out.

I’ve had such an exciting life.

Everywhere I go, particularly when there’s people who know me or recognize me, I get the warmest hugs and happiest sighs full of hope and full of relief.

I don’t paint, and I can’t draw, but I see things, I think, quite well, and I love being able to freeze things with the camera, particularly the children. Then I discovered with the camera that you can tell a whole story with just freezing a moment in reality. I find it a very good way, a very satisfying feeling.

I wince at some of the things I did as the young wife of Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

There’s nothing antifeminist about showing a lovely body; it’s part of the person you are.

I strongly believe that privacy is one of the biggest luxuries one can have in life – to have your own private world and not be invaded by the outside.

At 65, most of us still have a lot to give and a lot to contribute.

If you rely completely on protocol, you can become a robot.

I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I know this to be true: we have a great degree of control over what happens to us in the last third of our lives.

We can choose to wake up and grumble all day and be bitter and angry and judge others and find satisfaction in others doing bad instead of good. Or we can we wake up with optimism and love and say, ‘Just what is this beautiful day going to bring me?’

I’m pretty much an out-front, straightforward chick, and I get a bit confused by expectations.

Simply put, women should prepare in their 50s for the rest of their lives.

I have worked hard to become happy. It was a real struggle.

You can’t fix yourself out of a mental health issue. You can’t wake up and say, ‘Today I’m not being depressed!’ It’s a process to get well, but there is recovery.

Depression is 80 per cent of my condition, and 10 per cent is mania, and 10 per cent is what we call normal. I say that must be when I am buying groceries. Or vacuuming.

With my children, balance was everything: being not just a workaholic, not only studying but taking time to renew and restore yourself and taking time to pay attention to your brain health and not assume, as we all do, that our brains are perfect.

You need community support. You’re pretty defeated when you’re laid low with a mental illness. It’s a frightening place to be, and to get up and be able to stand and to move forward and to start functioning again, you need so much support. You need to feel you’re not alone.

For me, because I’m a mental health advocate, I want everyone to be the healthiest they can be.

Politics is an ugly and thankless role.

My life has been extreme. Most people will not have the experience I’ve had. But the things that changed me, really changed me, they happen to everyone.

I was so surprised, astonished, when I lost my mind, because I didn’t think that I ever would. I assumed I would always be just fine.

When you’re mentally ill, sometimes you’re so self-involved that you forget how much you’re hurting all the people around you who love you so much, because you don’t understand that you’ve got to get help.

I was a late bloomer on the career front.

Bad choices make good stories.

The best luxury in the world isn’t a diamond ring or a nice house – well, it could be – but it’s privacy.

The problem with mental illness, as opposed to physical illness, is that it involves wrong thinking or impaired insight. You’re not thinking correctly.

I’ve had enough of being public property.

I know, as a mother, it hurts you very much to see your children suffer.

The first thing that happens to someone with a mental illness, in the throes of it, is that they lose all their self-esteem. They don’t think they fit in.

I can only ask people to be tolerant of the fact that the… pressures of wives of politicians is very, very strong.

I’m no political pundit.

I had no idea there was such a thin line between sanity and insanity. I got pushed right to the edge by tragedy in my life, and I couldn’t stand up; I couldn’t recover.

I had to divorce my husband, the prime minister. I found it terribly overwhelming.

Oh, am I a feminist? I usually say that I was an accidental feminist. Really, I was just being me.

Don’t feel badly when you take off work to go for a run, to go for a walk; don’t feel badly to take time to play with your children, to be part of their lives. Work is important, but you can’t work at your best unless you’re a whole person.

Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair, prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn’t go my way, or I thought something was unfair, or I was bullied by my sisters.

Every day is wonderful for me.

I am a free spirit that must survive in a free world.

Every life is extraordinary.

I’m not really part of the Internet world, my age a factor in that and a lack of interest in sharing with so many, so little, so much, so often.

I live with being bipolar, but it doesn’t define me anymore.

I turned 65 and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m a senior. How did this happen?’

I tell the children I want everyone to love the life that they’re in, to be who they are… and make it the best life they can.

My honesty about mental illness has helped open a door for real conversation, and I think Justin wants to continue that conversation. He has put no restrictions on me. His father couldn’t. Why should he try?

I know what it’s like to feel marginalized and defeated and humiliated by suffering from a mental illness.

I have studied Freud and that kind of thing. I just never thought I would need it.

I tend to keep the press at a distance, you know, and I don’t really react to what they say. I react to what I feel more.

I am not a weirdo, a wacko, or an eccentric for wanting to do good, honest work on a day-to-day basis.

I don’t think Pierre Trudeau knew how to be a husband. I couldn’t stay in that marriage.

I have a bigger, peaceful view of life than aggressively breaking down other people.

Who am I – Canada’s Rodney Dangerfield? I get no respect.

I didn’t even like Mick Jagger.

I prepared myself for my marriage to Pierre Trudeau, but I didn’t prepare myself for marriage to the prime minister.

I was pregnant and nursing most of the years I was at 24 Sussex. I was ill-prepared and hardly even knew my husband, let alone how I was supposed to fit into this world that was very alien to me.

You have got to give. There is no other reason to be on the planet.