Paul Keating Quotations

For John Howard to get to any high moral ground he would have to first climb out of the volcanic hole he's dug for himself over the last decade. You know, it's like one of those deep diamond mined holes in South Africa, you know, they're about a mile underground. He'd have to come a mile up to get to even equilibrium, let alone have any contest in morality with Kevin Rudd.

In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you.

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

If this Government cannot get the adjustment, get manufacturing going again, and keep moderate wage outcomes and a sensible economic policy, then Australia is basically done for. We will end up being a third rate economy... a banana republic.

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

We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.

In the end, rational policy is always good.

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.

No choice we can make as a nation lies between our history and our geography. We can hardly change either of them. They are immutable. The only choice we can make as a nation is the choice about our future.

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