“If you put fences around people, you get sheep.”
“Character is doing the right thing when no-one is watching.”
“The day will come when men will recognise women as their peer, not only at the fireside, but in councils of the nation. Then, and not until then, will there be the perfect comradeship, the ideal union between the sexes that shall result in the highest development of the race.”
“Women and girls hardly ever fight the world’s wars, but they often suffer the most. Increasingly, they are the direct targets of fighting, when sexual violence is deliberately used as a tactic of warfare. And yet fewer than 10 percent of the people who negotiate peace deals are women, and only about three dozen individuals have been convicted and jailed by international war crimes tribunals for committing or commanding widespread sexual violence. Sexual violence in conflict is NOT inevitable. It can be stopped.”
“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.”
“ANDREW DENTON: We’ve seen the recent Senate report into the CIA intelligence failures in Iraq. What do you make of Michael Moore’s argument that President Bush is fraudulently elected and is pursuing a war for fraudulent reasons?
BILL CLINTON: Well, I… Those are two different things. I strongly, strongly disagree with the Supreme Court decision in the Bush v. Gore case in 2000. I think it is one of the very worst decisions the Supreme Court ever made and I explain in my book, in terms I hope a layman can understand, why I think it was a gross abuse of power. In effect, the Supreme Court robbed tens of thousands of their fellow citizens of their right to vote. So, I think that was wrong.
So, on the war, I have a slightly different view from Michael Moore but certainly a different view from the Bush Administration. Uh, the CIA is now being blamed for all this bad intelligence in America. They miss some things, you know. Apparently, they should have known that there was less likelihood of chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. OK, let’s posit that. I don’t think they cooked that up for President Bush ‘cause that’s what I was told for eight years too. But the CIA did not say there was a connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They didn’t say that. The Administration did but they didn’t. So, my view is that the President and Mr Cheney and Mr Rumsfeld and Mr Wolfowitz, they wanted to go to war in Iraq to replace Saddam because they thought the whole enterprise had merit in and of itself – to shake up the authoritarian Arab regimes in the Middle East, to make Israel feel more secure and give America more leverage in making peace with Palestinians and Israelis. And I think that, in the beginning, this whole weapons of mass destruction thing, for them, was maybe a good way to get their foot in the door but not the major issue for them.”
“It is the province of knowledge to speak, and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.”
“The one who is outside the door has already a good part of their journey behind them.”
“Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.”
“If it were between countries, we’d call it war;
if it were a disease, we’d call it an epidemic;
if were an oil spill, we’d call it a disaster;
but it’s happening to thousands of Australian women – and it’s just a domestic.”