Why is Greta Thunberg so triggering? Because of what she represents. In an age when democracy is under assault, she hints at the emergence of a new kind of power, a convergence of youth, popular protest and irrefutable science. And for her loudest detractors, she also represents something else: the sight of their impending obsolescence hurtling towards them.
Jennifer O'Connell
September 23, 2019
When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorises it and a moral code that glorifies it.
Frédéric Bastiat
September 16, 2019
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
September 12, 2019
I was overseas for five weeks and when I got back the nature of the political debate had got worse. Almost everything the government is doing in terms of policy discussion and formulation of legislation is designed to wedge the opposition; it’s not there to introduce good public policy. It’s rushed and the media has signed up to that because what I noticed when I got back was there was so much attention on how the Labor Party is responding to government policy rather than a discussion about the policy.
Barrie Cassidy
September 7, 2019
The bravery of young people who have been protesting on the streets of Hong Kong and Moscow is a powerful demonstration of what many in the West seem to have forgotten. Democracy is precious, and those who are lucky enough to have inherited one must strive to protect it.
The Economist
August 30, 2019
Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
August 29, 2019
Our current form of capitalism has no concept of right and wrong. It only recognises what is profitable and what you can get away with. And when you have the government, the media, the military and the police on your payroll, you can get away with pretty much anything.
Anonymous
August 20, 2019
When Morrison visits the Pacific Islands, he goes to their churches but he sends them to hell.
Adam Bandt
August 15, 2019
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and on-one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agenda or knowledgeably question those in authority; when clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Carl Sagan [1995]
August 11, 2019
When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there. But it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.
