“We must have an expansionary vision, one that captures the imagination and diversity of the whole community, one which benefits a nation which has moved beyond the basics of literacy and numeracy and which wants to develop a learning culture.”

Humans are mentally sick with a disease called fear.

With a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on the Iraq war, the US and Australia could ensure every starving, sunken-eyed child on the planet could be well fed, have clean water and sanitation and a local school to go to.

Australia must prioritise education spending. It is not a question of whether or not we have the money, it is a question of how we choose to spend it.

Years ago I resolved that because I had no ancestry myself I would leave a record of which my children would be proud, and which might encourage them to still higher effort

Never want something without expecting it

In the end, climate change is a math problem.

Whereas our common past, out of Africa, saw a global diaspora of humankind, our common future depends on a global coming together and consensus, resulting in a more equitable distribution of the Earth’s largesse.

In securing the future of the planet, we secure happiness for ourselves. One of the aims of the Greens is to turn around the tide of pessimism amongst the young people of the world.

I think I could have been quite difficult to fathom as a youngster, this kid who didn’t talk about himself very much.

Wilderness has become one of the world’s fastest disappearing resources, and it is non-renewable.

I am aware that one should always make room for renewal in politics. A democracy is the healthier for the turnover of the depth of talent there is in its community.

Yet unlike oil, gold or woodchips, it is essential to the wellbeing of humanity. We are made of it and fashioned by it…our psychological beings resonate with it.

I have seen such an immense change from the total repression and criminality of homosexuality in my lifetime. It does make me much more buoyant and optimistic about the future. If that change can occur in that time there’s hope for many other changes.

For comprehensive Earth action, an all-of-the-Earth representative democracy is required. That is, a global parliament.

As a Green, my goal is to put a smile on the face of the coming generations.

Real life security and contentment come not from putting a gun in the cupboard, but from taking a role in the world’s future.

You don’t go to a town to present the play and have applause at the end of it, but that’s benign conquest. It’s a glorious way of exploring other landscapes and other cultures in a very life-affirming way.

This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else’s being you can’t be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism.

I have no interest in artists who are purely affirmative, who’ve made a commercialized fetish of the culture’s stupidity.

I think that, we as a culture, feel like politics is one sector of our lives that can feel apart from our personal lives and the cultural things we’re interested in and the sports we watch. It feels like this separate, different thing.

We live in a youth-obsessed, aesthetically obsessed culture. That is no more evident than in the film industry.

Having grown up in a racist culture where 2 and 2 are not 5, I have found life to be incredibly theatrical and theater to be profoundly lifeless.

I don’t know why it is that we need to denigrate, to knock down. It’s so sick.

Foreigners cannot bring freedom, cannot bring democracy, because this is related to the culture, to the different factors that affect or influence that society. You cannot bring it, you cannot import it.