Paul Keating Quotes

He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up.

At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognize that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history every published. Think of that. Of course yes, Tolstoy and of course yes Keats and blah blah and yes indeed of course yes. But we're living in an age that has a tremendous richness of invention. And some of the most inventive people get no recognition at all. They get tons of money but not recognition as artists. Which is probably much healthier for them and better for their art.

We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers.

The good news is I've already outlived two Brontës, Keats, and Stephen Crane. The bad news is that I haven't written anything.

Are you saved?” asks the fundamentalist. “I am redeemed,” answers the Catholic, “and like the apostle Paul I am working out my salvation in fear and trembling, with hopeful confidence—but not with a false assurance—and I do all this as the Church has taught, unchanged, from the time of Christ.

Outside half a dozen youthful demonstrators chanted about the rights of the ‘young unemployed’. The Prime Minister excepted, they were the best dressed people in West Torrens. There is no disguising a Young Liberal’s haircut.

His focus on this transcended economics into a kind of spiritualism. The exchange rate was a spirit in a waterhole; to lay the spirit required acolytes to teach it, and priests to pray over it.

John Hewson: "I ask the Prime Minister: [...] why will you not call an early election?" Paul Keating: "The answer is, mate, because I want to do you slowly.

If Tony Abbott ends up the prime minister of Australia, you've got to say, god help us. [He is] truly an intellectual nobody [and has] no policy ambition.

John Howard always pops up at these occasions - he's at every national, international catastrophe, sort of representative of White Lady Funerals.

Whenever you put your hand in your pocket, Dr Hewson's hand will be there, too.

[He's] the cherry on top of a compost heap ... The great risk for Malcolm is that he doesn't remain a cherry but turns into a sultana.

Neville Wran said it was 'the equivalent of stealing the holy water from the church ... but they got away with it.

On 8 June, Hawke told the conference that the party needed to remind itself of 'its fundamental and historic rule' as 'the party of progress and reform'. He urged Labor to remain contemporary and relevant. He said 'the meaning of reform' was 'not about soft options' and 'not a matter of invoking some dogmatic formula'.

The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Books still came with their leaves uncut. Sartre tore the edges of Levinas’ book open without waiting to use a paperknife, and began reading as he walked down the street. He could have been Keats, encountering Chapman’s translation of Homer: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise — Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Australia, as its most viciously eloquent prime minister, Paul Keating, once pointed out, “is the arse end of the world”. So what inspired Great Britain to select distant Botany Bay as the outhouse of its empire? Let’s start with tea.

…he wrote, ‘The good news is I’ve already outlived two Brontës, Keats, and Stephen Crane. The bad news is that I haven’t written anything.

If one takes pride in one's craft, you won't let a good thing die. Risking it through not pushing hard enough is not a humility.