Journalists From Australia

"Now, a woman, she’s a woman. I ’ave fixed that for a cert. They’re jist as like as rows uv peas from ’at to ’em uv skirt. An’ then, they’re all so different, yeh find, before yeh’ve done, The more yeh know uv all uv ’em the less yeh know uv one."

"Professional gardeners are usually rather earthy uncommunicative men with a deliberate manner, a slight stoop and the dull-fish-like eye of the confirmed pessimist."

"Someone has said From the day we draw breath Until life be sped Two things are certain: Taxes and death. From the rise of the curtain, On life's dreary round, As hope wanes or waxes, Man ever found Two things are certain: Taxes and death— Especially taxes."

"Get a —— move on, Have some —— sense. Learn the —— art of Self de- —— -fence!"

"It’s bad enough to be a bloke without one reel close friend; But when your dog gives you the bird it’s pretty near the end."

"Women is strange. You take my tip; I’m wise. I know enough to know I'll never know The ’uman female mind ..."

"It is on record (in a booklet written by Guy Innes) that when Dennis decided to migrate from South Australia he telegraphed his father, "Send ten pounds. Going ", to which appeal the old man promptly replied, "Sending nothing. Go to hell!""

"These images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person.”"

"Ladies and gentlemen, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we’ve been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It’s a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It’s not a bad thing, and it doesn’t make you exceptional."

"I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people."

"I learn from other disabled people all the time. I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. Genius. We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us."

"We are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses."

"That quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"... 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."

"... Around the country several hundred science-and-religion ("S&R") courses are taught each year at colleges and universities. ... Within a Christian context, three questions characterize much S&R discourse: Can the universe described by science also be seen as the creation of the Judeo-Christian God? Can that God act within the scientific universe—and if so, how? Finally, can the Christian story—with its specific claims about the incarnation of God in the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth, and its promise of resurrection—continue to make sense in light of modern-science?"

"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."

"This case has always been about reaffirming the principle that all Australians should be able to participate in public debate without being denigrated and accused of supporting heinous crimes like terrorism because of their background"

"it's time for white people to take a back seat. Politics has moved on. Step back."

"I feel so sad. We begged you to stop amplifying and normalising hatred and racism. But you told us we were 'politically correct' and 'freedom of speech' was more important. The more you gave the far-right a platform, the more powerful they got. We begged you."

"Mediocre white people: they should be in the bin but instead they own everything and are every fucking where."

"The white people are getting fucked Yas, it's happening"

"Right after the inauguration, President Trump made introductory phone calls to foreign heads of state. His conversation with Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a close US ally, was a sign of what was to come. The prime minister pressed the president on whether he would follow through on a deal on refugees previously negotiated between the two countries. "This deal would make me look terrible," he reportedly told Turnbull. "I think it is a horrible deal, a disgusting deal that I would have never made." Despite the prime minister's attempts to reason with him, Trump shut down the conversation. "I have had it. I have been making these calls all day, and this is the most unpleasant call all day." Then he hung up."

"Well the laws of Australia prevail in Australia, I can assure you of that. The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia.""

"Colonel Vaughn shot well. He bought us five hundred years."

"I've never seen myself as a campaigning journalist. A maverick, yes. But I'm a reporter and I'll always be a reporter, forever curious. And, I suppose, if anything drives me it's curiosity"

"I love irony in pictures. There's one photograph from Vietnam by Philip Jones Griffiths that shows a very large GI having his pocket picked by a tiny Vietnamese woman. It told the whole story of the clash of two cultures and how the invader could never win."

"I stand by every word I've ever written. I can back everything up with facts. I have never made the facts fit an agenda, unlike the corporate media. But, if I didn't annoy all the right people all the time, I would be very upset."

"The impact of the human tragedies I've reported on is that, more often than not, I'll be angry. I want to know why is this child dying? These are not acts of God; they're results of respectable politicians' decisions."

"If those who support aggressive war had seen a fraction of what I've seen, if they'd watched children fry to death from Napalm and bleed to death from a cluster bomb, they might not utter the claptrap they do."

"When governments and other vested interests attack me personally I usually regard it as a vindication, otherwise they would use facts. That's why I believe in the wonderful Claud Cockburn dictum, 'Never believe anything until it is officially denied.' It has certainly been my experience."

"Barack Obama is a glossy Uncle Tom who would bomb Pakistan. Hillary Clinton, another bomber, is anti-feminist. John McCain's one distinction is that he has personally bombed a country."

"Many journalists now are no more than channelers and echoers of what Orwell called the official truth..."Impartiality" and "objectivity" now mean the establishment point of view...This is internalized. Journalists don't sit down and think, "I'm now going to speak for the establishment." Of course not. But they internalize a whole set of assumptions, and one of the most potent assumptions is that the world should be seen in terms of its usefulness to the West, not humanity."

"The censorship is such on television in the US that films like mine don't stand a chance."

"Kim Hill: All this time, then, the United Nations and weapons inspectors have been some kind of puppets of the US. Pilger: Are you saying that? Hill: I am asking you whether that is what you are implying? Pilger: That's a leading question, I wouldn't ... Hill: How would you describe the activities of the United Nations up until this point? Pilger: Which area of the United Nations? It's a very big organisation."

"During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places."

"More terrorists are given training and sanctuary in the United States than anywhere on earth. They include mass murderers, torturers, former and future tyrants and assorted international criminals. This is virtually unknown to the American public, thanks to the freest media on earth."

"There is no War on Terrorism; it is the speeded up. The difference is the rampant nature of the , ensuring infinite dangers for us all."

"Pilger: You waste my time because you have not prepared for this interview, as any journalist does, and I've done many interviews. The one thing is to prepare for them and this interview, frankly, is a disgrace. Hill: What preparation would you have cared for, Mr Pilger? Pilger: To read. Read. It takes time. Hill: It's a pity you wasted a lot of your time tonight, Mr Pilger. I was looking forward to ... Pilger: No, I haven't. I'm quite pleased with my answers. I hope you broadcast them as I've given them. Hill: We broadcast you exactly as you are. It's been interesting to speak with you."

"In fact, Hamas's real threat is its example as the Arab world's only democratically elected government, drawing its popularity from its resistance to the Palestinians' oppressor and tormentor."

"It is not enough for journalists to see themselves as mere messengers without understanding the hidden agendas of the message and the myths that surround it."

"Twenty years ago today, in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, a gun was fired close to where I was standing. One bullet passed over my shoulder and struck a woman in the face; another lodged in the brain of a man who almost certainly would have become president of the United States. Robert Kennedy had seen his assassin leap on to a table and take aim; the flash of the little man's shiny yellow jacket remains indelible with me. "No!" Kennedy had screamed, half glancing for a space against the wall, anywhere, to escape. He lay mortally wounded beside a refrigerator, half smiling, tousled hair, eternal youth applied for; the face on the posters."

"[An account of a visit to East Timor] I carried with me hand-drawn maps of other, unmarked graves where some of those murdered by Indonesian troops at the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre had been buried; I had no idea that so much of the country was a vast grave, marked by paths that ended abruptly, and fields inexplicably bulldozed, and earth inexplicably covered with tarmac, and villages that are not so much human entities as memorials. Kraras is one of them. It is known as the "village of the widows", because the whole community of 287 people was slaughtered by the Indonesians. In a meticulous hand that carried on from a faded typewriter ribbon, a priest recorded the name, age, cause of death and date and place of the killing of every victim. In the last column, he identified the Indonesian battalion responsible for each murder. I have the document, which I always find difficult to put down, as if the blood of East Timor is fresh on its pages."

"I have always had a great deal of admiration for Bob Hawke and the work he did as ACTU president; in fact it's a shame he's not still ACTU president. If he is as I found him last week, now that he's bereft of booze and smokes and on a Pritikin diet, I would quite frankly prefer he returned to the booze."

"The consensus, often called "the tolerant society," began to sicken under the Labor Governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan; under Mrs. Thatcher, it is dying. One example: There are 7,000 officially recorded racist attacks each year. The true figure is probably many times that. Of immigrant families I have interviewed, none allow their children to play outside, none has escaped at least one firebombing, none bother to call the police for fear of being arrested themselves on a bogus charge."

"I always say that the difference between the United States and Australia is that US settlers were on a mission from God whereas Australian settlers were God-forsaken."

"Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of Russian writers touring the United States were astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and watching television, that almost all the opinions on all the vital issues were the same. "In our country," said one of them, "to get that result we have a dictatorship. We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails. Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What's the secret?""

"[On the September 11 attacks] In these surreal days, there is one truth. Nothing justified the killing of innocent people in America last week and nothing justifies the killing of innocent people anywhere else."