people-from-victoria

"The aggressive promotion of the commercial side of Christmas has seen a shift where some people are even unaware of its Christ origins."

"World Youth Day is always a wonderful opportunity for young people from around the world to build bridges of friendship and hope between continents, peoples and cultures."

"In recent decades, the staffing of the Catholic Schools in my area is almost totally carried out by lay people. In the main, our staff are dedicated to the schools and their Catholicity. This demands not only a competence in the area of teaching and communication but also a lifestyle which is in keeping with the Catholic teachings and doctrine taught."

"We begin by acknowledging one another's humanity, we begin by getting to know one another as human beings well before we move on to talking about history and theology."

"We've seen the Red, like a thirsty king, Bend over the silent stream; We've seen the Mallee its tassels fling, To steal of the sunset's gleam; The Blue's young shoots, with his leaves gray pearled, A cloud that has gone awry; The Ironbark, with his limbs up-hurled As though he would win the sky. * * * He stands apart from the Old World trees, Unbound by the laws of form; He bows his head to the zephyr breeze, But laughs at the drought and storm. We stand alone, like our own great tree, Afar from the nations' hum. Come, brothers! Keep we our homeland free As limbs of our Austral gum."

"As an amateur historian I think it’s the same, century after century: same shit, different flies."

"Laws are meant to work, not just be kept for their own sake."

"Our ship has sunk and now we try to rebuild it out of driftwood."

"Am I alive? Death seems so hard to pin down in this century."

"People like tradition and certainty, especially when the world around them is changing so fast."

"There is no more dangerous enemy than one who despises learning."

"Paparazzi were loitering in increasing numbers with their high-tech cameras and intrusion drones, a sure sign that a scandal was suspected."

"Read any history of first contact between civilizations. Even if those in power on the weaker side are able to fight back, there are always those who turn traitor and support the invaders. They are the Luministes in the picture, they sell their own people into submission to gain power under the invader."

"A carbon budget is like a household budget. You only have so much money to spend. How you choose to spend and invest your money will determine the available budget for your retirement and the legacy you provide for future generations."

"Climate change has already altered the extreme weather we experience in Australia and will continue to do so over the coming years."

"If we want a greater chance than 66% of limiting warming to two degrees, we would need to emit even less carbon dioxide. Conversely, if we accepted a lower probability of limiting the warming to two degrees, the budget would be higher."

"We have already committed the planet to a certain amount of warming due to past carbon emissions. But efforts to reduce emissions now and over the next few decades will critically affect the degree of future warming."

"Ultimately there's one judgement that’s supremely important and that's before the good God when you die. Now if I had thought that death was the end of everything, that the ultimately important thing was my earthly reputation, well obviously my approach would have been different."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.”"

"[Music] gives a lot of young people who can’t express themselves in any other way – which is probably why they’re in the youth justice system in the first place – it gives them a voice."

"You can reach the darkest point in our life and come back, and come good, even better."

"People need to understand that as well, that some of the families, maybe a lot of the families: what they did [was] out of the goodness of their hearts, and out of love."

"You realise everybody suffers…I’m able to have that hope, you know. I’m able to hold on and see the light in the darkness."

"To become great, whether an artist, a musician, a writer, a philosopher or creator or scientist, even as one great in sport, the secret lies, assuming there is some native ability in the first place, in one factor above all others – emotion."

"You only ever grow as a human being if you're outside your comfort zone."

"He was a short guy who’s about five foot two, Cerutty, and he ran barefoot, he ran around town in Melbourne shirtless wearing his very small shorts and recruited Landy and a bunch of other runners to train them to be the best. He had these outlandish methods. Not only was running barefoot part of that but running up and down sand dunes, running through nature, living off a vegetarian root-based diet, considered running a, best way of saying it, as an art, as an expression of art."

"He was eccentric, he was unpredictable, and he was entertaining, had an enormous sense of fun, but he would be very close to probably the most widely read man that I've met, in terms of the breadth of subjects that he read about: spiritual aspects or physical aspects or mental aspects, or art, or science or saints or devils … Underneath it all there was a sort of sound philosophy based on "Let's improve ourselves as human beings, let's become more compassionate, let's become bigger, let's become stronger, let's become nicer people.""

"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!"

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

"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."

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

"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 vehement concentration upon 'rights' obscures the vital fact that unless duties are accepted and performed by each of us, not only our rights but the rights of others will die for want of nourishment. If we were all tired democrats, eager beneficiaries but reluctant contributors, democracy would collapse under its own weight."

"If we want to make our contribution to the pacification of the world, it is our duty to present to the world the spectacle of a rich country with a great people, with an adequate population — with a population which may justly say to the rest of the world: 'We are here; we propose to maintain our integrity as a nation; and our warrant for that is that we are using the resources which God has given into our hands.'"

"Heckler: I wouldn't vote for you if you were the Archangel Gabriel."

"Many times I have said, and I repeat it tonight, that we do badly to think of the pioneers as grandfathers, with beards and bowyangs; dead and gone, their labours completed. For the truth is that when a nation gives up pioneering, it goes back. A pioneer is, quite simply, one who breaks new ground or sets out on new adventures. His essence is that he is willing to tackle a new problem, and has a sense of responsibility for the future. Such qualities are not common, and therefore we cannot all be managers. But unless in every generation we have an adequate supply of pioneers, future generations will not call us blessed. Flashy policies, get-rich-quick schemes, the preferring of big current dividends to solid reserves for future development; these are the negation of the pioneering spirit, for they deny or ignore responsibility for the future."

"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."

"The real and active Communists in Australia present us with our immediate problem — not the woolly-headed dupes, not the people who are pushed to the front in order to present a respectable appearance, but the real and active Communists."

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

"I owe my tolerable health to having selected my parents well."