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All Quotes by author - Paul Keating

" Aboriginal art and culture draws from the land, for Aboriginality and the land are essential to each other and are inseparable. "

" A more worldly and competent foreign and defence policy is by far the preferred first line of defence - rather than the default position of relying on expensive but problematic hardware. "

" As prime minister, the pastoral lease question was a very vexing and torrid one for me. "

" At its best, Aboriginal art has been effective in translating an entire culture and the understanding of an entire continent. Indeed, the more we interpret Australia through Aboriginal eyes, through the experience of their long and epic story, the more we allow ourselves to understand the land we share. "

" Countries get one chance in history of putting into place a savings retirement scheme on the scale of the Australian superannuation system. "

" Geoffrey Tozer's death is a national tragedy. For the Australian arts and Australian music, losing Tozer is like Canada having lost Glenn Gould, or France, Ginette Neveu. It is a massive cultural loss. The kind of loss people felt when Germany lost Dresden. "

" I always believed in burning up the government's political capital, not being Mr Safe Guy, you know? "

" If one takes pride in one's craft, you won't let a good thing die. Risking it through not pushing hard enough is not a humility. "

" If you can't imagine it, you sure as hell are never going to see it. "

" I have long believed, especially after the unprovoked Western attack on Iraq and the ransacking of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, that North Korea would not desist from the full development of its nuclear weapons program, despite threats and sanctions from the West and even from China. "

" I have said before, you don't expect conservative parties to believe in much, but you do expect them to believe in thrift. "

" In the end, rational policy is always good. "

" I think Australia has to be a country which has the 'Welcome' sign out. "

" I think the Australian people are very conscientious. During the 1980s and 1990s we proved they will respond conscientiously to necessary reforms. They mightn't like them but they'll accept them. But reforms have to be presented in a digestible format. "

" I think the rise of China is one of the great events of all economic and human history, and I think this will be overwhelmingly a positive thing for the region and the world. "

" I try to use the Australian idiom to its maximum advantage. "

" I used to say in the cabinet room, 'confidence is not like a can of Popeye spinach - you can't take the top off and swallow it down.' You know, confidence has to be earned. "

" I've always held the view that great states need strategic space. I mean, George Washington took his space from George III. Britain took it from just about everybody. Russia took all of Eastern Europe. Germany's taken it from everywhere they can, and China will want its space too. "

" My claim has always been that defeatism pervaded the conservative parties in the 1930s and that it was the defining characteristic of Menzies and his first period as prime minister. "

" Nobody wants to have in their CV in the upper echelons of the American economic family that they nationalised major banks. "

" One of the inevitable aspects of debates about euthanasia is the reluctance on the part of advocates to confront the essence of what they propose. "

" One tires of combat, although I can still throw a punch, you know. "

" Politicians come in three varieties: straight men, fixers, and maddies. "

" Politicians never fade away; they just keep carrying on, you know, their class. "

" Russia alone has the capacity to obliterate the United States. "

" The death of Malcolm Fraser underwrites a great loss to Australia. Notwithstanding a controversial prime ministership, in later years he harboured one abiding and important idea about Australia - its need and its right to be a strategically independent country. "

" The essence of leadership is essentially taking the responsibility of trying to interpret the future to the present. "

" The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century. "

" The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism: a complex interplay of nation-state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism. "

" The G7, just a European centric show, an Atlantic show, is fundamentally finished. "

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