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.
KEATING, PAUL – Redfern Speech, 10 December 1992
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things being done to us.
KEATING, PAUL – on taking risks
You know me, love – downhill, one ski, no poles.
KEATING, PAUL
As a small businessperson, you have no greater leverage than the truth.
KEATING, PAUL
No choice we can make as a nation lies between our history and our geography.
We can hardly change either of them. They are immutable. The only choice we can make as a nation is the choice of our future.
KEATING, PAUL
In the end, the key ingredient for public life is imagination. You imagine something better, you try to bring the people with you.
KEATING, PAUL – Speech to accept Honorary Doctorate Macquarie University, 12 April 2012
One is left with the thought that given the way we now abuse the ocean and abuse the climate that we are heading towards our own iceberg, which is looming on the horizon. It’s not visible yet but it certainly exists there and it won’t be my generation that has to deal with the fact that the world is not bountiful forever, that the ocean and the atmosphere are not free goods to be abused, that will have to feed these vast populations. That will be your generation.
KEATING, PAUL
In the end it’s the big picture which changes nations and whatever our opponents may say, Australia’s changed inexorably for good, for the better.