Geoffrey Tozer's death is a national tragedy. For the Australian arts and Australian music, losing Tozer is like Canada having lost Glenn Gould, or France, Ginette Neveu. It is a massive cultural loss. The kind of loss people felt when Germany lost Dresden.

Paul Keating

I think the rise of China is one of the great events of all economic and human history, and I think this will be overwhelmingly a positive thing for the region and the world.

Paul Keating

Positive History Great

The essence of leadership is essentially taking the responsibility of trying to interpret the future to the present.

Paul Keating

Leadership Future Yin

Countries get one chance in history of putting into place a savings retirement scheme on the scale of the Australian superannuation system.

Paul Keating

Men History Chance

The only reward in a public life is public progress. You stand back and say, 'What did I get out of it?' You look around, and the place is better, and that's it.

Paul Keating

War Life You

The more we view the country through the prism of Aboriginality, the more likely we are to get the angle right.

Paul Keating

View UN Try

The First World War was a war devoid of any virtue. It arose from the quagmire of European tribalism: a complex interplay of nation-state destinies overlaid by notions of cultural superiority peppered with racism.

Paul Keating

War World War World

At its best, Aboriginal art has been effective in translating an entire culture and the understanding of an entire continent. Indeed, the more we interpret Australia through Aboriginal eyes, through the experience of their long and epic story, the more we allow ourselves to understand the land we share.

Paul Keating

Experience Art Yes

One tires of combat, although I can still throw a punch, you know.

Paul Keating

You UN Tires

You know, in the WikiLeaks cables, the Chinese discovered that Kevin Rudd was urging the Americans to keep the military option open against them. This is hardly a friendly gesture.

Paul Keating

You Wikileaks Them

If you can't imagine it, you sure as hell are never going to see it.

Paul Keating

You T Sure

You see, psychologically, Australia must understand it has to live in the region around it. Australia must find its security in Asia; it cannot find its security from Asia.

Paul Keating

You Us Understand

What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship, and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity.

Paul Keating

Independence Courage Age

When the Berlin Wall came down the Americans cried, 'Victory,' and walked off the field.

Paul Keating

Wall Walked Walk

The First World War not only destroyed European civilisation and the empires at its heart; its aftermath led to a second conflagration, the Second World War, which divided the continent until the end of the century.

Paul Keating

War Art World War

Politicians come in three varieties: straight men, fixers, and maddies.

Paul Keating

Men Tie Three

What distinguished the First World War from all wars before it was the massive power of the antagonists.

Paul Keating

War Power World War

You get one chance to do something about native title. You get perhaps one chance in your life to do something about a republic. You get one chance, your chance, to build a piece of the political architecture in the Pacific. I wasn't going to give those up.

Paul Keating

Life Chance Architecture

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.

Paul Keating

Good You Won

Geoffrey Tozer's death is a national tragedy. For the Australian arts and Australian music, losing Tozer is like Canada having lost Glenn Gould, or France, Ginette Neveu. It is a massive cultural loss. The kind of loss people felt when Germany lost Dresden.

Paul Keating

Music Death Art

When we were actually in the Keating reform era, the Business Council was of no help.

Paul Keating

Business Were Us

Well, Australians should speak for the national interests of Australia, and whatever role former Australian prime ministers may have, one of the things you do is speak frankly about the country as you see the country's best interests, you know?

Paul Keating

The great changes in civilisation and society have been wrought by deeply held beliefs and passion rather than by a process of rational deduction.

Paul Keating

My claim has always been that defeatism pervaded the conservative parties in the 1930s and that it was the defining characteristic of Menzies and his first period as prime minister.

Paul Keating

As prime minister, the pastoral lease question was a very vexing and torrid one for me.

Paul Keating

Politicians never fade away; they just keep carrying on, you know, their class.

Paul Keating

Well, I think that - I think leadership's always been about two main things: imagination and courage.

Paul Keating

You see, before I became prime minister, the Australian prime minister only attended ever two meetings in the world: the British Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and the South Pacific Forum.

Paul Keating

When one has been touched by the stellar power and ethereal playing of a sublime musician, one is lifted, if only briefly, to a place beyond the realm of the temporal.

Paul Keating

Aboriginal art and culture draws from the land, for Aboriginality and the land are essential to each other and are inseparable.

Paul Keating

I have said before, you don't expect conservative parties to believe in much, but you do expect them to believe in thrift.

Paul Keating

I think the Australian people are very conscientious. During the 1980s and 1990s we proved they will respond conscientiously to necessary reforms. They mightn't like them but they'll accept them. But reforms have to be presented in a digestible format.

Paul Keating

I think Australia has to be a country which has the 'Welcome' sign out.

Paul Keating

One of the inevitable aspects of debates about euthanasia is the reluctance on the part of advocates to confront the essence of what they propose.

Paul Keating

The death of Malcolm Fraser underwrites a great loss to Australia. Notwithstanding a controversial prime ministership, in later years he harboured one abiding and important idea about Australia - its need and its right to be a strategically independent country.

Paul Keating

I try to use the Australian idiom to its maximum advantage.

Paul Keating

I've always held the view that great states need strategic space. I mean, George Washington took his space from George III. Britain took it from just about everybody. Russia took all of Eastern Europe. Germany's taken it from everywhere they can, and China will want its space too.

Paul Keating

The United States being in Asia is unambiguously a good thing for the region.

Paul Keating

Nobody wants to have in their CV in the upper echelons of the American economic family that they nationalised major banks.

Paul Keating

The G7, just a European centric show, an Atlantic show, is fundamentally finished.

Paul Keating

In the end, rational policy is always good.

Paul Keating

The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.

Paul Keating

I always believed in burning up the government's political capital, not being Mr Safe Guy, you know?

Paul Keating

I used to say in the cabinet room, 'confidence is not like a can of Popeye spinach - you can't take the top off and swallow it down.' You know, confidence has to be earned.

Paul Keating

What we have to do is make our way in Asia ourselves with an independent foreign policy. Our future is basically in the region around us in South East Asia.

Paul Keating

I have long believed, especially after the unprovoked Western attack on Iraq and the ransacking of the Gaddafi regime in Libya, that North Korea would not desist from the full development of its nuclear weapons program, despite threats and sanctions from the West and even from China.

Paul Keating

A more worldly and competent foreign and defence policy is by far the preferred first line of defence - rather than the default position of relying on expensive but problematic hardware.

Paul Keating

Russia alone has the capacity to obliterate the United States.

Paul Keating

Truth is, of its essence, liberating, as it is possessed of no contrivance or conceit - that it provides the only genuine basis for progress and that the future can only be found in truth.

Paul Keating