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

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

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

If there was a university degree for greed, you cunts would all get first-class honours.

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.

Leadership is not about being nice. It's about being right and being strong.

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

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.

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.

If you are sitting on the title of any block of land in New South Wales you can bet an Aboriginal person at some stage was dispossessed of it.

Anybody who achieves what Malcolm Fraser achieved in his life deserves respect as a quite extraordinary Australian.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

The Labor Party is not going to profit from having these proven unsuccessful people around who are frightened of their own shadow and won't get out of bed in the morning unless they've had a focus group report to tell them which side of bed to get out.