Defense Ministers

"My main message will be that perhaps the United Nations should be reformed to make the institution capable of addressing the threats that really exist today. I think blocking the Security Council on Ukraine is a token, a symptom, of the general weakness of the U.N."

"We are witnessing the rebirth of nationalist ideology which violates human rights and international law under the cover of humanitarian slogans about protecting minorities. We recognize this all too well from the 1930s."

"If in so many places we are witness to conflicts that entail the death of thousands of people and humanitarian dramas, this happens as a rule due to a failure to observe fundamental human rights. Entire communities and nations are denied influence over political decisions. Power without control is in most cases, corrupt and self-loving, incapable of lifting countries out of underdevelopment and poverty."

"The wish for freedom is contagious, that's why all tyrants fear it. Freedom seen from close up inspires human strivings. Its triumphant march began in Poland."

"Everybody knows that voters dislike pay increases for politicians, and they enjoy it when money is taken away from politicians."

"Communism finished in Poland 25 years ago, on 4th June 1989. We tore down the Iron Curtain of propaganda and lies to be able to live in the truth. We tore down the Iron Curtain which the authorities of the People’s Republic used to hide behind, in order to build a democracy, a system where authorities are held responsible before the citizens. On that day, for the first time, elections were no propagandist fiction but the making of a real choice."

"We need to think how not to respond only to the crisis in Ukraine, not to extinguish the political, economic and military fire, but to start systematically support the modernization of Ukraine, to help it and itself to realize national goals."

"We do not want to diminish the achievements of others, but we want (...) others to remember that freedom began in Poland."

"Poland seeks European solidarity notably by the deepening of the integration process and among other things by the deepening of the principle of solidarity between nations."

"There are conflicts and troubles in many parts of the world, but the places where people have come together for talks and to find political solutions are now much safer and more prosperous,"

"Turkey's goal is to contribute to the formation of a Libya that has ensured its territorial integrity and political unity, and lives in peace, tranquility and stability,"

"Turkey's hydrocarbon-related activities in east Mediterranean are completely based on her legitimate rights and international law. Energy projects in the east Mediterranean that exclude Turkey from the energy equation are doomed to fail. We strongly believe peace and stability in the region can be achieved through dialogue,"

"In 1795 an edict went forth against the further teaching of the Oyomei philosophy; and so docile was the mind of Japan that from that time on Oyomei concealed itself within the phrases of Confucianism, or entered as a modest component into that military Zen which, by a typical paradox of history, transformed the pacific faith of Buddha into the inspiration of patriotic warriors."

"“I had for many years been a devout believer in Shushi says Nakaye Toju (1608-48), “when, by the mercy of Heaven, the collected works of Oyomei were brought for the first time to Japan. Had it not been for the aid of their teaching, my life would have been empty and barren.”"

"There were contradictions in this philosophy, but these did not disturb its leading opponent, the gentle and peculiar Wang Yang-ming. For Wang was a saint as well as a philosopher; the meditative spirit and habits of Mahayana Buddhism had sunk deeply into his soul. It seemed to him that the great error in Chu Hsi was not one of morals, but one of method; the investigation of things, he felt, should begin not with the examination of the external universe, but, as the Hindus had said, with the far profounder and more revealing world of the inner self."

"I often wonder if some of the people who quote the Good Friday Agreement have actually read it, and the Good Friday Agreement is very explicit that the sovereign government, the UK government must be rigorously impartial in how it administers Northern Ireland and we all need to respect the fact that the aspirations of both unionist people and nationalist people are equal."

"The EU is not a prison — nobody has to stay, but it’s also a home and we’re not going to kick anybody out either."

"The matter has been to the high court. These people came by boat. It's been made clear to them at every turn that they were not going to stay in Australia and they still had children. We see that overseas in other countries, anchor babies so-called: the emotion of trying to leverage a migration outcome based on the children."

"The spotlight is given to people like Fraser Anning or like this senator [Faruqi]. The comments she’s made and the desire to extract some sort of political advantage or attention seeking out of this circumstance, I think is appalling."

"I’m hardly going to take morals lectures from the extreme left, who frankly are just as bad in this circumstance as people like Fraser Anning, they should equally be condemned."

"The reality is people (in Melbourne) are scared to go out at restaurants of a night time because they’re followed home by these gangs, home invasions, and cars are stolen and we just need to call it for what it is. Of course, it is African gang violence."

"New Zealand don’t contribute really anything to the defense effort that we’ve got where we’re trying to surveil boats that might be on their way to New Zealand, so I hope that (NZ Justice Minister) Andrew Little reflects a little more on the relationship between Australia and New Zealand where we do a lot of the heavy lifting."

"It’s going to mean that people who need medical services in Australia are going to be displaced from those services. Because if you bring hundreds and hundreds of people from Nauru and Manus down to our country, they are going to go into the health network, I don’t want to see Australians who are in waiting lines in public hospitals kicked off those waiting lines because people off Nauru and Manus are now going to access those health services."

"Somebody once said to me that the world’s biggest collection of Armani jeans and handbags up on Nauru waiting for people to collect when they depart."

"If there is a particular problem that people can point to within a certain community, and we’re talking about a significant number of people in that community who are doing the wrong thing, then clearly mistakes have been made in the past. The reality is that Malcolm Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in in the 1970s and we’re seeing that today. We need to be honest in having that discussion."

"Some of the crazy lefties at the ABC, and on The Guardian, Huffington Post, can express concern and draw mean cartoons about me and all the rest of it. They don’t realise how completely dead they are to me."

"Time doesn't mean anything when you're about to have water lapping at your door."

"They won't be numerate or literate in their own language, let alone English. These people would be taking Australian jobs, there's no question about that. For many of them that would be unemployed, they would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare and the rest of it so there would be huge cost and there's no sense in sugar-coating that, that's the scenario."

"The reality is Malcolm Fraser did make mistakes in bringing some people in the 1970s and we're seeing that today. We need to be honest in having that discussion. There was a mistake made. Lessons from past migrant programs should be learnt for people settling in Australia today."

"I believe very strongly that most Australians and certainly the vast majority of veterans would want us to abolish this law."

"I didn’t appreciate the symbolism of it, and the importance to Indigenous people."

"I do think on the information that I’ve seen, people do need help, and they need help from a civilized country like ours."

"Some people are trying it on. Let’s be serious about this. There are people who have claimed that they’ve been raped and came to Australia to seek an abortion because they couldn’t get an abortion on Nauru. They arrived in Australia and then decided they were not going to have an abortion. They have the baby here and the moment they step off the plane their lawyers lodge papers in the federal court which injuncts us from sending them back."

"He is a very active statesman, we have really warm relations. This is a person who knows what he wants and can achieve his goals. At the same time I consider him to be a reliable partner with whom one can negotiate and be sure that agreements with him will be implemented."

"In neighboring Yemen, the Houthi rebel group had seized the capital Sana’a in September 2014 and brought down the internationally recognized government. The Saudis accused the Iranians and Hezbollah of supporting and arming the Houthi rebel group whose fighters belonged to a Shia subsect known as Zaidi. When Sana’a fell, Prince Salman was defense minister and his son Mohammad was his aide. The young prince was incensed by what he perceived as the weakness of King Abdallah in dealing with the Houthis and Iran. Some Iranian politicians declared smugly that Iran now controlled four Arab capitals: San’aa, Baghdad, Damascus, and Beirut. Worse, Iran’s sphere of influence had extended to Saudi Arabia’s southern border. Soon, the Houthi rebels would start lobbing rockets into the kingdom. On January 23, 2015, King Abdallah died and Salman became king. He appointed his son as defense minister. The duo and the coterie around them wanted to push back against Iran and step into the vacuum that America was creating. The Saudis wanted to beat their chests, restore Sunni pride, and bolster their leadership of the Muslim world. And so, for the first time in its recent history, on March 25, 2015, the kingdom went to war."

"MBS is attempting to undertake LBJ-like social reforms and Thatcher-like economic reforms."

"We are simply reverting to what we followed – a moderate Islam open to the world and all religions. 70% of the Saudis are younger than 30, honestly we won’t waste 30 years of our life combating extremist thoughts, we will destroy them now and immediately."

"We know that we are a main goal for the Iranian regime. We will not wait until the battle becomes in Saudi Arabia but we will work to have the battle in Iran rather than in Saudi Arabia"

"Adopting unrealistic policies to reduce emissions by excluding main sources of energy will lead in coming years to unprecedented inflation and an increase in energy prices, and rising unemployment and a worsening of serious social and security problems."

"As we tried to make sense of Donald Trump's positions or when one of us tried to argue against them, we first had to ask: Why is the president so attracted to autocrats? After a contentious meeting about the president's engagement with a foreign dictator, a top national security aide offered me his take. "The president sees in these guys what he wishes he had: total power, no term limits, enforced popularity, and the ability to silence critics for good." He was spot on. It was the simplest explanation. For instance, Donald Trump sympathized with Saudi crown prince bin Salman's violent internal purge in 2017, saying the country's leaders "know exactly what they are doing" and adding that "some of those they are harshly treating have been 'milking' their country for years!" This included long-time US interlocutors who were allegedly held against their will, beaten, imprisoned, or put under house arrest."

"We have our values: it is important to us, the participation in decision making; it is important to us to have our freedom of expression; it is important to us to have human rights. We have our own factors, values and principles as the Saudi society and we try to make progress according to our own needs."

"The paradox wouldn’t last. Iran and Saudi Arabia both feared ISIS, but they hated each other more. Secretly, many Arabs cheered ISIS on, hoping it would bring Tehran to its knees and put an end to Iranian dreams of hegemony in the region. And as Iran took the lead in fighting ISIS on the ground, it looked like Shias were out to kill any Sunnis, the latest brutal, sectarian mutation of the Saudi-Iran rivalry. Which came first: Iran’s imperial sectarianism or the Sunni sense of exceptionalism? By now the dynamic was hard to unpack, but it was about to intensify with the rise of King Salman and his favorite son, prince Mohammad bin Salman. While Obama dismissed Iran’s “destabilizing activity” as a “low-tech, low-cost activity,” Saudi Arabia watched with alarm as Iran poured thousands of men and an estimated $35 billion into Syria to prop up Assad. Suleimani was turning into the king of Iraq. As the US-Iran nuclear negotiations inched closer to a deal in the spring of 2015, the Saudis grew unnerved by the prospect of cash flowing into Iran’s coffers after the lifting of sanctions. They seethed as US secretary of state John Kerry and the Iranian foreign minister Javad Zarif exchanged pleasantries and smiled for the cameras during the negotiations."

"The Saudi military operation, launched with barely a warning to the Obama administration, was called Decisive Storm. Within hours, bombastic Saudi analysts went on television claiming the campaign would be so successful it would be studied in history books. Airplanes from Saudi allies joined in, at least initially. The Sunni world watched the Saudi air strikes against the Houthi rebels and felt their pride restored. And Prince Mohammad bin Salman, two months into his job as defense minister, was certain this would make him king of the Middle East chessboard, a mastermind who could rival Suleimani. The days of King Abdallah’s consensus politics were over, his penchant for compromise not part of Bin Salman’s repertoire. The military campaign would be anything but decisive. The Saudis had never fought a war in such a way; they had never deployed troops. They couldn’t do precision strikes with their fancy fighter jets. They were now facing a guerrilla force in rugged, hilly terrain. The conflict would drag on for years; tens of thousands of civilians would die by 2019, in air raids by the Saudi-led coalition and ground fighting, but the worst impact would be the starvation and diseases. Ten million people were on the brink of famine because of the blockade the Saudis and the United Nations had imposed, and the country was battling a dangerous outbreak of cholera. Almost ninety thousand children died. It was the largest humanitarian crisis in the world, almost on par with Syria."

"You’re from Britain, and I am a fan of Churchill. And Churchill said that opportunities come during crises. And I recall Churchill’s statement whenever I see the obstacles or the crises in the region. So this is how I view the challenges or the crises in the region."

"And the court did not, at all, make any distinction between whether or not a person is Shi’ite or Sunni. They are reviewing a crime, and a procedure, and a trial, and a sentence, and carrying out the sentence.""

"First of all I’m not the architect of the Yemen operation. We are a country of institutions. The decision to proceed with the operation in Yemen, this is a decision to do with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defence, with the intelligence, the council of ministers, and the council of security and political affairs, and then all recommendations are submitted to His Majesty, and the decision to go forward is with His Majesty."

"My dream as a young man in Saudi Arabia, and the dreams of men in Saudi Arabia are so many, and I try to compete with them and their dreams, and they compete with mine, to create a better Saudi Arabia."

"I believe MbS is a nationalist who loves his country and wants it to be the strongest but his problem is that he wants to rule alone."

"There is no question of ever accepting Nazi representatives in the Austrian cabinet. An absolute abyss separates Austria from Nazism. We do not like arbitrary power, we want law to rule our freedom. We reject uniformity and centralization. . . . Christendom is anchored in our very soil, and we know but one God: and that is not the State, or the Nation, or that elusive thing, Race. Our children are God’s children, not to be abused by the State. We abhor terror; Austria has always been a humanitarian state. As a people, we are tolerant by predisposition. Any change now, in our "status quo", could only be for the worse."

"The situation changed visibly when sentimental reasons and long-term political aims gave way to a stern, ruthless nationalist ideology which would brook no compromise. Hitler had categorically demanded the Anschluss in "Mein Kampf". . . . As early as 1923 Hitler had decide that, if necessary, the National-Socialists must take over the government in Austria by force."