People From Victoria

"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."

"'I pay my taxes', says somebody, as if that were an act of virtue instead of one of compulsion."

"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."

"Twice in this century men have died by the millions, largely because in what might have been the golden age of history men have learned to live with machines and have forgotten how to live with one another."

"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."

"The Communists are the most unscrupulous opponents of religion, of civilised government, of law and order, of national security. Abroad, but for the threat of aggressive Russian Imperialism, there would be real peace today. Communism in Australia is an alien and destructive pest. If elected, we shall outlaw it."

"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."

"Menzies: If I were the Archangel Gabriel, you wouldn't be in my constituency."

"Our slogan is Australia Unlimited, and we pronounce it with confidence."

"There is a tremendous amount of talk engaged in about economic problems; there is a great amount of discussion about how much more money A gets or B gets or C gets. We could easily become man for man, woman for woman, the richest country in the Southern Hemisphere, but it won't matter very much unless we can say that we are the most civilised country in the Southern Hemisphere. Civilised because we understand the unselfish duties of citizenship; civilised because we have come to understand the importance of the human being, the dignity of the human being, the dignity of labour, the responsibility of riches. These are the tests of civilisation, and our great task is to produce a civilised nation."

"I am an immense believer in continuity. I am not a believer in looking at the past because it is dead; but looking at the past because it is living; looking at the past because it reminds us that we are in the great procession of life. Any man who walked in the procession of life and who aims at doing anything in life, who is unaware of what went before him, unaware of the great truths that have come down to him, is a foolish man. He is, essentially, a short-sighted man."

"A national election campaign is not a conflict of self-interest, with the prize going to the highest bidder. It is an occasion for a re-statement of faith, a renewal of zeal, and a clear vision of the future."

"Are you looking forward to a breed of men after the war who will have become boneless wonders? Leaners grow flabby; lifters grow muscles. Men without ambition readily become slaves. Indeed, there is much more in slavery in Australia than most people imagine. How many hundreds of thousands of us are slaves to greed, to fear, to newspapers, to public opinion – represented by the accumulated views of our neighbours! Landless men smell the vapours of the street corner. Landed men smell the brown earth, and plant their feet upon it and know that it is good."

"I do not believe that the real life of this nation is to be found either in great luxury hotels and the petty gossip of so-called fashionable suburbs, or in the officialdom of the organised masses. It is to be found in the homes of people who are nameless and unadvertised, and who, whatever their individual religious conviction or dogma, see in their children their greatest contribution to the immortality of their race. The home is the foundation of sanity and sobriety; it is the indispensable condition of continuity; its health determines the health of society as a whole."

"The country has great and imperative obligations to the weak, the sick, the unfortunate. It must give to them all the sustenance and support it can. We look forward to social and unemployment insurances, to improved health services, to a wiser control of our economy to avert if possible all booms and slumps which tend to convert labour into a commodity, to a better distribution of wealth, to a keener sense of social justice and social responsibility. We not only look forward to these things, we shall demand and obtain them."

"The most fundamental task in front of us is to educate a new generation, not for mere money-making or to comply with the law, but for an enlightened citizenship based upon honest thinking and human understanding."

"The great vice of democracy – a vice which is exacting a bitter retribution from it at this moment – is that for a generation we have been busy getting ourselves on to the list of beneficiaries and removing ourselves from the list of contributors, as if somewhere there was somebody else’s wealth and somebody else’s effort on which we could thrive."

"The material home represents the concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving "for a home of our own." Your advanced socialist may rave against private property even while he acquires it; but one of the best instincts in us is that which induces us to have one little piece of earth with a house and a garden which is ours; to which we can withdraw, in which we can be among our friends, into which no stranger may come against our will."

"A great house, full of loneliness, is not a home. “Stone walls do not a prison make”, nor do they make a house. They may equally make a stable or a piggery. Brick walls, dormer windows and central heating need not make more than a hotel. My home is where my wife and children are. The instinct to be with them is the great instinct of civilised man; the instinct to give them a chance in life – to make them not leaners but lifters – is a noble instinct."

"The best epitaph for a true democrat will not be, "I tickled people's ears, I got their votes, I spent their money", but, "I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.""

"I would like to thank all those present—and those who are no longer present."

"It is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that, in consequence of the persistence of Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her, and that, as a result, Australia is also at war. No harder task can fall to the lot of a democratic leader than to make such an announcement.Great Britain and France, with the cooperation of the British Dominions, have struggled to avoid this tragedy. They have, as I firmly believe, been patient; they have kept the door of negotiation open; they have given no cause for aggression. But in the result their efforts have failed and we are, therefore, as a great family of nations, involved in a struggle which we must at all costs win, and which we believe in our hearts we will win."

"I am today beginning to understand as I have never understood before, the secret springs of English poetry and English thought and the getting of that wisdom which infuses the slow English character. The green and tranquil place sends forth from her soil the love of peace and of good humour and of contentment."

"We can lose this war, and with it we can lose all. But we shall not lose it if every individual in the British Empire determines that for him there shall be nothing but cheerful and self-sacrificing effort until the war is over. I tell you quite bluntly that Australia cannot play her proper part in the winning of this war if she subtracts from her war effort by one unnecessary grumble, or by one act of sectional selfishness, or by the unnecessary loss of one day’s work."

"At last we are in England. Our journey to Mecca has ended and our minds abandoned to those reflections which can so strangely (unless you remember our traditions and our upbringing) move the souls of those who go "home" to a land they have never seen."

"One thing about bureaucrats is that they never swallow their young. Leave them alone and you'll find them increasing every year."

"What Great Britain calls the is to us the near north."

"The same kind of logic holds in respect of Saudi Arabia. The regime might inflict punishments every bit as obscene as those enforced by the Islamic State. But it's a reliable ally, prepared to enforce the status quo in an oil rich region - and that matters more to the West than the life of a democracy protester."

"Everything we feared about communism – that we would lose our houses and savings and be forced to labor eternally for meager wages with no voice in the system – has come true under capitalism."

"The kingdom has oil - and lots of it. But that's only part of the story. Saudia Arabia is important to the West not despite of its brutality but because of it, for the Saudi dictatorship's seen as a buttress against "instability" in a strategic region. 's deeply conservative leaders did everything they could to derail the Arab spring, suppressing an upsurge of democratic sentiment that threatened the regimes with whom the West had always done business."

"We're all familiar with the outrage that politicians display about certain human rights violations in the Middle East - generally, those committed by regimes or organisations we're about to bomb. But the more usual attitude is a realpolitik in which the West either supports or quietly ignores the barbarities of favoured states."

"It is most likely that the Higgs boson, supersymmetric particles, or whatever other surprises await us, will be revealed by means of Dalitz plots."

"Dalitz plots led to the discovery of some 100 ephemeral particles, many living no longer than the time taken by a light beam to cross an atomic nucleus."

"I was enlightened by some long conversations with Dick Dalitz, a particle physicist, who himself was a giant of Australian physics known for the Dalitz plot and the Dalitz pair."

"In reality, experimenters are cussed individuals, eager to prove the theoreticians wrong whenever possible."

"One can see clearly some ambivalence in Dirac's attitudes... On the one hand, he has repeated many, many times his conviction that beauty in the fundamental equations of physics has priority... On the other hand... we see Dirac deeply involved with approximate calculations whose only purpose was to obtain an answer which the experimenters could rely upon."

"The two photons are entangled and according to local realism, their polarization planes should become independent... a typical EPR situation. Already in 1948, observations... agreed with quantum mechanics, not with local realism."

"'Practice makes perfect' is bullshit. Only perfect practice makes perfect."

"If I didn’t escape at intervals with straws in my hair and commit a thoroughly idiotic, irresponsible and undignified piece of foolery, such as having a newspaper row with a politician over the banning of Redheap, for instance, I should have no other resource but to take myself seriously as an artist, and perish in a just conviction of ignominy."

"A man’s self-respect is curiously involved with his ability to force a community to disburse certain sums of money for his maintenance and diversion. I have done thirty years of journalism, including jam-labels and inducements to use hair-restorers, and my conscience is undisturbed."

"The peculiar rigidity of the English mind is seen at its noblest in the Times literary supplement."

"Oh, no, no, no! Couldn't think of it. It's a very dangerous book. Had a very bad influence."

"There is something extremely disgusting in having one's work pawed by policemen."

"The best love affairs are those we never had."

"If anyone assumes that going one's own way is the easy way, they are very much in error. There's no harder way to go."

"They were a bloodthirsty lot, those sentimentalists who wept for the sad lot of the working classes."

"A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.'"

"I am fanatic enough to believe that my thought is something the world needs."

"Oh, rolling round the ocean, From a far and foreign land, May suit the common notion That a sailor's life is grand.But as for me, I'd sooner be A roaring here at home About the rolling, roaring life Of them that sails the foam.For the homeward-bounder's chorus, Which he roars across the foam, Is all about chucking a sailor's life, And settling down at home.Home, home, home, That's the song of them that roam, The song of the roaring, rolling sea Is all about rolling home."

"Don't you know that nothin' gives a man greater remorse than havin' his face punched, his toes trod on, and eggs rubbed in his hair?"