“There is no such thing as being non-political. Just by making a decision to stay out of politics you are making the decision to allow others to shape politics and exert power over you. And if you are alienated from the current political system, then just by staying out of it you do nothing to change it, you simply entrench it.”
“But the artist persists because they have the will to create, and this is the magic power which can transform and transfigure and transpose and which will ultimately be transmitted to others.”
“When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”
“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
“Indeed, the test of orderliness in a country is not the number of millionaires it owns, but the absence of starvation among its masses.”
“Let us not demand of ourselves that we alone must be the agent of change. In a fire brigade everyone passes along a bucket, but only the last person puts out the fire. None of us know where we stand in line. We may be here simply to pass a bucket; we may be called on to play a major role. In either case, all we can do is think, act, and say. Let us direct our thoughts, words, and actions to peace. That is all we can do. Let the results be what they will be.”
“After thinking long and hard about what life will be like when we die, I’m convinced that so much is dependent on our life now and on our state of mind at the moment of death. To prepare yourself for that inevitable journey you must begin to take responsibility for all that you are in this life, to look at your life with clarity and assess it with truth. It seems that our delusions about what life holds for us in the hereafter arise from our delusions about who we are in the here and now. If we can accept that we are already spirit beings living in a spirit realm, we can accept that death is not so much a journey to a different world but to a different state of mind.”
“Be careful of your thoughts,
For your thoughts become your words;
Be careful of your words,
For your words become your deeds;
Be careful of your deeds,
For your deeds become your habits;
Be careful of your habits,
For your habits become your character;
Be careful of your character,
For your character becomes your destiny.”
“When Janine Haines was elected Leader of the Democrats in 1986, she became the first woman to lead a national political party. The Democrats have had 5 female leaders. When Janine Haines, became the first Australian Democrat to enter the Senate in 1977, she joined seven other women. At that time, of the 177 Members of the House of Representatives, there was not one female member. A higher proportion of women has consistently been elected to the Upper House compared to the Lower house, which begs the question, “Which House is more representative? It is also worth noting that in 101 years there have only been two Indigenous members of the federal parliament and both were elected to the Senate: Senators Neville Bonner and Aden Ridgeway.”
“If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the US does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us.”