Academics From Australia

"Having been banished from his home and friends, Dante created in The Divine Comedy a new life for himself. Denied a voice in Florence, he recreated himself in fiction and gave this poetic "self" a voice that would ring through the ages. What we have in the poem is, in effect, a "virtual Dante." In fact we know far more about this virtual Dante (what literary critics call "Dante-pilgrim") than we know about the real historical person ("Dante-poet"). It is this virtual self who speaks to us across the centuries and is our guide through the landscape of medieval soul-space."

"... Faraday's momentous discoveries did not immediately launch an electric power industry. For one thing, nobody yet imagined it would be possible to transmit this power over long distances. That realization did not come until the end the century, when physicists had acquired a formal mathematical understanding of how magnetism and electricity work together."

"In many respects the mythico-religious dimension of Pythagoras' life bears an uncanny resemblance to the life of Christ depicted in the New Testament. Both men are said to have been the offspring of a god and a virgin woman. In both cases their fathers received messages that a special child was to have been born to their wives—Joseph was told by an angel in a dream; Pythagoras' father, Mnesarchus, received the glad tidings from the Delphic oracle. Both spent a period of isolation on holy mountain, and both were said to have ascended bodily into the heavens upon their deaths. Furthermore, both spread their teachings in the form of parables, called akousmata by the Pythagoreans, and a number of parables from the New Testament are known to be versions of earlier Pythagorean akousmata."

"By far the most famous outsider physicist today is a wealthy man. Stephen Wolfram is his name, and aside from being one of the youngest people to win a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, he was a mathematical prodigy who graduated with a Ph.D. from Caltech at the age of twenty. After he won the MacArthur, Wolfram left academia to forge a path of his own and made a fortune developing a software package used by scientists all over the world. Wolfram's wealth enabled him to pursue work on his own "Theory of Everything" unencumbered by the demands of academic tenure, and in 2002 he presented his ideas in a twelve-hundred-page, self-published book called A New Kind of Science ... Encompassed in Wolfram's theory was a new explanation for space and time, a new explanation for the laws of thermodynamics, a new account of the creation of the universe, an explanation for the origin of life, and his own account of free will."

"The association between religion and mathematically based science has its origins in the mists of history. ...the very dawn of Western culture in sixth-century B.C. Greece. ...[W]hen the Greeks were turning away from the mythological picture immortalized by Homer and Hesiod, the Ionian philosopher Pythagoras of Samos pioneered a worldview in which mathematics was seen as the key to reality. In place of the mythological gods, Pythagoras painted a picture in which the universe was conceived as a great musical instrument resonating with divine mathematical harmonies. ...[inspiring] mystics, theologians, and physicists ever since. ...But to Pythagoras and his followers, mathematics was the key not simply to the physical world, but more importantly to the spiritual world—for they believed that numbers were literally gods. By contemplating numbers and their relationships, the Pythagoreans sought union with the "divine." For them, mathematics was first and foremost a religious activity."

"The regime may have hoped that its land reclamation policies would attract the greatest acclaim but plenty of other public works figured into Fascist policy and propaganda. The national railway system was a cherished part of the project of bonding Italians, all the more because Farinacci had been prominent in pushing railwaymen early into a Fascist union."

"When the national transport system was tested a few years later by the Second World War, the Fascist railways showed little advance on the Liberal ones and the transport of goods, especially south of Rome, remained a serendipitous affair."

"Syndicalist A.O. Olivetti maintained, the Fascist state had invented the economic system surpassing both socialism and liberalism. Its first clause ran: ‘the Italian nation is an organism having a purpose, life and means of action superior to those of any individual or groups who are part of it.’"

"Whereas once the movement had flirted with feminism, now Mussolini required that female organizations focus on charity, ‘to the exclusion of any political action which must be left exclusively to the party."

"Other, mostly richer Italians dealt with the meaning of life under the dictatorship in a more straightforward manner. What might be termed their everyday Mussolinism was, however, scarcely based on a literal application of Fascist totalitarianism. When their actions are reviewed carefully, it becomes plain that they by no means reliably believed, obeyed or fought, despite the regime slogan–credere, obbedire, combattere–insisting that they should."

"To the dismay of some ras, Mussolini suddenly announced that he wished to frame a deal with those socialists who might be willing to treat, especially with their trade unionist wing, end the social war burning through the countryside and, by implication, look to the formation of a grand coalition of new mass parties and organizations in order to overthrow the liberal system, be it embodied in parliament in Rome or in the institutions of civil society."

"Bolshevism [Mussolini] knew, was not really a Jewish phenomenon and the manifestations of anti-Semitism in current-day Hungary could not be applauded. Yet, he reckoned, such responses should not astonish. Even in Italy, where ‘anti-Semitism is unknown and we believe will never be known’, Zionism was a troubling development. It was to be hoped that ‘Italian Jews continue to be smart enough not to encourage anti-Semitism in the only country where it had never been.’"

"Mussolini exhibited a cynical skill at rewarding his enemies and rebuking his friends."

"Fascism, with its habitual use of the language of aggression—not for nothing did Mussolini regularly rejoice in his own savagery, seeing himself as a cat who walked by itself at night ready to scratch, claw and kill—deeply tinctured such thoughts and assumptions. Yet Fascism did not by itself create its bleakly Darwinian view of the functioning of the international system."

"In 1919 a nationalist general concluded bitterly that, when confronted by the ‘test of war’, Italy had demonstrated that ‘no one governed it.’"

"As Archduke Franz Ferdinand made his way to Sarjevo, Mussolini remained an extreme socialist, committed to pulling down the Liberal order in the interests of world-spanning revolution. The outbreak of the war did not at first alter that situation. However, by September 1914, the attachment of the editor of Avanti! to the official line of neutralism was crumbling. In October, Mussolini broke from the [Socialist] party, proclaiming that, although still a believing socialist, he was certain that the cause of social overturn could be better hurried by war than by Italy remaining at peace. Mussolini thus joined the ranks of the interventionists, a motley crew in terms of political background, although the great majority nourished a deep belief in their intellectuality and self-importance."

"In 1918 [Mussolini] had coined the slogan: ‘the man who never changes his mind… is a blockhead’… None the less, this early Fascism did often sound radical, even ‘socialist’, in everything except its foreign policy and reading of contemporary history (both in Italy and in Russia). In June of 1919, for example, the fasci maintained that they wanted the voting age lowered to eighteen (Mussolini had frequently talked about youth bringing zest to anything Fascists might do)… Other initial fasci aims were the institution of an eight-hour day, minimum pay, participatory democracy on the factory floor and improved state insurance for workers. Landowners should be obligated to cultivate their land and any fields that were not utilized productively should be handed over to peasant cooperatives, with a preference for those run by returned soldiers… The fasci favoured progressive tax and the punitive review of war contracts and profits, as well as the seizure of the goods held by religious houses."

"In June 1914 the newshound Mussolini was to the fore in playing up the social disturbances known as ‘Red Week’, at the peak of which revolutionaries, stirred up by the socialist conference at Ancona in April, attempted full-scale insurrection. As a historian of Liberal Italy portrayed it evocatively: ‘Local dictators proclaimed republics, the red flag was hoisted above town halls, taxes were abolished and prices reduced by decree, churches were attacked… landlords’ villas sacked, troops disarmed and even a general captured."

"At the next socialist party congress, held in July 1912 at Reggio Emilia, the PSI again split, the most vehement attacks on the three moderates coming from the young ‘maximalist’ or radical, Benito Mussolini, who soon took over the editorship of the party’s paper Avanti! from Claudio Treves, another reformist, and, later, for good measure, fought a duel against him."

"In this conflict [Red Week], Mussolini for the moment stood on the other side of the barricades; on 10 June, destined to be a redolent date in Fascist history, he urged: ‘We must take up again our anti-militarist propaganda to ensure that bayonets are only raised when we [socialists] want them to be… Our propaganda must break into the barracks, where currently the sons of the people are taught how to kill their own brothers.’"

"If ever a word was in the air, then in Italy around the time of the First World War, it was ‘Fascist.’ Fascista, Fascismo, Fascio: each turned up on numerous occasions and in diverse settings. Doctor deputies, endeavouring to be a pressure group, formed themselves into a Fascio Medico Parlamentare as early as 1906."

"A historian tabulated 16 rival groups who, earlier in 1919, had been using the word fascio to describe themselves. Ranging from anarchists to restless bourgeois university students, these ‘fascists’ had nothing in common except their name."

"As the elections were being held, he published in Gerarchla a disquisition on Machiavelli. He had, he remarked, just re-read the Florentine writer's corpus, although, he added modestly, he had not fully plumbed the secondary literature in Italy and abroad. Machiavelli's thought was, Mussolini announced, more alive now than ever. His pessimism about human nature was eternal in its acuity. Individuals simply could not be relied on voluntarily to 'obey the law, pay their taxes and serve in war'. No well-ordered society could want the people to be sovereign. Machiavelli’s cynical acumen exposed the fatuity of the dreams of the Enlightenment (and of Mussolini’s own political philosophy before 1914)."

"On 4 July [1938] before an audience at the ‘new town’ of Aprilia, [Mussolini] excoriated what he rudely called ‘the great demoplutocracies’; they were, he added flatly, the ‘enemies of Italy’. The new tone of exasperation in his words worried members of the Italian establishment, but Mussolini, taking his temerity one step further, now told Ciano (of all people) that the ‘defeatist’ bourgeoisie needed to be brought into line by a ‘third wave’ of Fascism."

"[Mussolini’s] most ambitious article for La Lima was a lengthy review of Marx on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death. Here Mussolini celebrated the father of socialism as an activist, as one who was simultaneously ‘scientific’ and realistic. Marx, he wrote with fervour, had demonstrated conclusively that ‘a class will never give up its privileges unless it is forced to do so.’ He had proven without a doubt that ‘the final struggle will be violence and “catastrophic’” because capitalists would certainly not surrender without a bitter fight."

"Mussolini was, of course, not the only dissident ever to leave a socialist party, especially during the trauma of the First World War. In many countries, the great conflict demanded that a choice be made between the ideals of internationalist socialism and those of the nation."

"In 1914, by almost every index, Italy was the least of the great powers. Nor, despite huffing and puffing about imperial conquest and racial prowess, would that ranking be much altered during the Fascist years."

"The fasces pledged national unity above all; each of the sticks represented a sector of society, organically bound into the corporate system. No class, gender, regional or other form of division could weaken a Fascist state, locked together as it was, a proletarian nation, needing to end subjugation by the plutocratic, established, great powers, in a Darwinian struggle of the national fittest; one Italian people, one Fascist state, one Duce at the head."

"As I explore Mussolini’s personality, his power, its effects and its limitations, I became convinced that the Duce was not just the first modern dictator but also, far better than Hitler, the personage against whom to measure the very many tyrants who dominated so many countries in Europe between the wars and, in the developing world, then and thereafter. In more complex parallel, Mussolini also bore some comparison with Stalin and his later epigones in Eastern Europe, who, in apparent oxymoron ruled as national communists."

"Whereas Hitler believed fundamentally and literally in racist science, Mussolini might often sound hard-line, and certainly regularly spoke up for murder. Yet, equally, he remained capable of skepticism, cynicism, intellectual analysis, doubt, contradiction, confusion, sullen bafflement, all positions that the ‘science’ of ‘terrible simplifiers’ condemns and refutes. Whatever else he was, Mussolini was not an ‘other’, unrecognisably distinct from contemporary or even present-day politicians and executives."

"Which European politician of the first half of the twentieth century could be relied on to read the philosophical and literary works of his co-nationals and send their authors notes of criticism and congratulations? Who, at the time of profound crisis and despite his evident ill health, kept on his desk a copy of the works of Socrates and Plato, annotated in his own hand? Who declared publicly that he loved trees and anxiously quizzed his bureaucracy about storm damage to the environment? Who, in his table talk while he was entrenched in power, was fascinated by the task of tracing his intellectual antecedents?... Who seemed almost always ready to grant an interview and, having done so, was especially pleased by the prospect of talking about contemporary political and philosophical ideas? Who left more than 44 volumes of his collected works? Who claimed with an element of truth that money never dirtied his hands? Who could conduct a conversation in three languages apart from his own?... The somewhat surprising answer to all these questions is Benito Mussolini, Duce of Italian Fascism and dictator of Italy from 1922 (or 1925) to 1945 (or 1943)."

"Whatever else he was, Mussolini was no Hitler impelled by a credo to act in one way and one way only."

"Mussolini was an activist and, in his own mind, a purist one, who deservedly bore the names of Cipriani and the young Costa. In his poetry, he chanted solemn obituaries for fallen comrades, summoning vengeance against their persecutors. He was a Republican; in a paper called IlProletario (The Proletarian), he ridiculed the ways of kings, urging their swift overthrow. Parliament, too, he deemed a farcical organization, which the virtuous must one day destroy. Those moderate socialists who were trying to make it work in the proletarian interest were deluding themselves."

"Mussolini was a fervent internationalist. Nevertheless, despite his Marxist orthodoxy and despite the fact that the processes of the nationalisation of the masses were feebler in Italy than in the countries to the north, a notion of Italian identity seeped into his words and actions."

"Beneath the anger of Trump supporters lies something deeper – shame, the shame of no longer being able to get ahead, the bitterness that their children will be worse off than they are, the resentment of being told they are backward, and fearing that they might be. Like who put their faith in Putin, and Chinese patriots who back Xi, Americans who support Trump are responding to their private or collective humiliation."

"Many analysts have fallen for the right-wing construction of a new world. Suddenly they think they must have missed something fundamental, some tectonic shift that was rumbling, undetected, beneath their feet."

"The tectonic shifts that gave rise to Trumpism have been gathering force over the last six decades. Over that time, the left won the cultural battle and the right won the economic battle, and Trumpism is a reaction against both."

"Menzies was the first – and maybe the only – national leader of whom it could be safely said that he was capable of rising to the top of almost any ladder he dared to climb."

"They put a crown upon his head And though he wore it into bed, He sometimes said as he sadly sat, "It's not a crown, it's an old felt hat!""

"Robert Menzies could not lead a flock of homing pigeons."

"No one would ever forget Robert Menzies. I learned a lot from him."

"I have had many strange and some bitter experiences in my political life."

"You have some good points, Mr Menzies, but the trouble is you are too la-di-da."

"The Augustan simplifications of Sir Robert Menzies and the cheery simplicities of Mr Holt have been replaced by the confused superficialities of Mr Gorton."

"It has become the vogue for some writers in Australia to refer to me, apparently under the impression that they are using a derogatory expression, as an . I certainly am, and would be sadly disappointed if I thought that a majority of my fellow citizens were not of the same mind. I love Britain because I love Australia, and like to think that I have done her some service. I cannot go anywhere in Australia without being reminded of our British inheritance; our system of responsible government and Parliamentary institutions, our adherence to the rule of law and, indeed, our systems of law themselves; our traditions of integrity in high places and of incorruptibility in our Civil Service. We derive all these things from Westminster. Our language comes to us from Britain and so does the bulk of our literature. To have no love for a relatively small community in the North Sea which created and handed on these vital matters would be, in my mind, a miserable act of ingratitude. The fact that in Australia we have received all these things, and have made all our own notable contributions to their development, not only fills me with pride but strengthens my affection."

"There have been, in the course of recorded history, some men of power who have cast shadows across the world. Winston Churchill, on the contrary, was a fountain of light and of hope. [...] His body will be carried on the Thames, a river full of history. With one heart we all feel, with one mind we all acknowledge, that it will never have borne a more precious burden, or been enriched by more splendid memories."

"There is hardly a section of the community that doesn't in one breath protest undying hostility to Government interference and, in the next breath, pray for it."

"All I ask you to remember, in this country of yours, is that every man, woman and child who even sees you with a passing glimpse as you go by, will remember it – remember it with joy, remember it in the words of the old seventeenth-century poet who wrote those famous words – "I did but see her passing by And yet I love her till I die.""

"[O]ur whole history has been a history of adventure, sailing wherever ships could sail. This island continent came out of the mists; it was developed by people who had the spirit of adventure. It has been found by people who had the spirit of adventure. Wherever you go in Australia, you see all the memorials, not cairns of store, but the memorials in farms and stations and factories to the people who had the spirit of adventure. And without that spirit of adventure, Australia can't become by the turn of the century the great and powerful and respected country to whose noises I would hope to listen from the grave."

"I am British to the bootstraps!"