Colombo's All-Time Great Canadian Quotations

Trevor S. Raymond is a teacher and librarian with the Peel Board of Education and editor of Canadian Holmes.

This collection of quotations (the first one I have read cover to cover)
is an entertaining, informative, exasperating delight, differing in
three major ways from most such collections: the quotations make up
considerably less than half the text, they are arranged neither by
subject nor by speaker, and there is no subject index.

Colombo, compiler of several previous books of quotations, has here
selected “600 essential or basic quotations that effectively dramatize
the history of Canada.” They are arranged chronologically, from 1000
BC to 1995. This means that words of, say, Wilfrid Laurier, do not
appear together but are scattered between 1885 and 1914. They can be
found by checking Laurier in the not-always-reliable index. Each
quotation is accompanied by a discussion giving background and context,
sources, and contemporary and subsequent thoughts. It is these comments
that make up the bulk of the book. For instance, “‘The twentieth
century belongs to Canada.’—Laurier, 1904” gets more than a page
of critique. Some 200 more quotations can be found in these
commentaries. After “Anonymous,” the most-cited person is Pierre
Trudeau (20); second is Brian Mulroney (14), and third is Frank Ogden
(12). Naturally, readers will seriously question why some of what is
here is deemed so important to Canadian history by Colombo (who includes
one quote from his own published work in this collection of what he
calls “our famous lasting words”). We find here thoughts from the
3000-year-old Vedas, for example, and from Virgil. Each reader will
doubtless think of quotes he or she might deem more worthy of inclusion.
That, of course, is part of the book’s fun—and its value.