“George Bush Junior [George W Bush] was a religious fanatic, and Tony Blair wasn’t far behind in a way.”

It was Indira Gandhi who very much lined up with the Russians. And she was, you know, within the Commonwealth, basically one out on that.

There is no doubt that this government and this country are benefiting from the reforms that we brought in the 1980s, and that couldn’t have been done without the co-operation of the trade union movement.

Peoples have come to experience that political structures and divisions of power are not immutable.

I got to know him well as Vice President to Ronald Reagan. And George rang me up and said, “Oh, Bob,” he said, “I’m having trouble with Brian [Mulroney].” He said, “He’s got a big wheat trade with Iraq, and he doesn’t want to upset that.” I said, “You leave it with me.”

I only travel with a carry-on suitcase in most instances.

I said, “Will you help us?” He said, “Yes.” So, I set aside senior people in our treasury and they worked with Wolfensohn and the investment sanctions were applied.

“If Australia keeps going the way it is, it will finish up the poor, white trash of Asia.” And he was right, because we were just going backwards.

[ Rajiv Gandhi] was such an infinitely more attractive leader than his mother.

People often wondered why. What I see as a possible explanation is [that] he came from a very wealthy family – a ‘squattocracy’ – and he had private education at home and then he went to boarding school at Melbourne Grammar School, one of those lead schools in Australia.

I just loved him and he loved me… He was a most humble man, the most decent man I’ve ever met in my life and he always looked for the best in people to find positives and he said something to me that always remained with me.

It was very much an Australian/New Zealand initiative to have a nuclear free South Pacific. And the Americans were very apprehensive about this.

It had things that it could do and which I thought were worthwhile: one would be South Africa, of course. And, as I said, I assumed a leadership role within the Commonwealth on that.

Brian Mulroney, myself, [and] Rajiv Gandhi; I think that was the real core [of the Commonwealth ]. That was the engine room, I reckon.

I hated [Robert Mugabe]. He’s one of the worst human beings I’ve ever met. He treated black and white with equal contempt. He was a horrible human being.

While society cannot provide employment for its members, the production/work/income nexus has to be abandoned as a justification for our present parsimony to the unemployed.

And it did seem to me that one way that we could bring the apartheid regime down would be if we did mount an effective investment sanction.

Live so that when the final summons comes you will leave something more behind you than an epitaph on a tombstone or an obituary in a newspaper.

When we are confronted by failure and mistakes, we can leave them behind and go on with our lives.

Fashion: a barricade behind which men hide their nothingness.

Satire is, more than those he brands, to blame; He hides behind a magisterial air He own offences, and strips others’ bare.

A farmer’s horse is never lame, never unfit to go. Never throws out curbs, never breaks down before or behind.

All we can take with us to heaven is what we leave behind in the lives we touch.

Landscapes can be deceptive. Sometimes a landscape seems to be less a setting for the life of its inhabitants than a curtain behind which their struggles, achievements and accidents takes place.

Leaving behind the false, return to the true: make no discriminations between self and others. In contemplation, one’s mind should be stable and unmoving, like a wall.