If you believe all of the world’s scientists got together to fake 7,000 climate studies as part of an elaborate hoax, you’re not a conservative, you’re a lunatic. We have to stop treating people brainwashed by right-wing propaganda as political actors and start treating them as patients.

Cenk Uygur

Since 1996 – seven years before Greta Thunberg was born – the Liberal party has been working assiduously to advance the cause of fossil fuel companies at the expense of our future. Morrison’s paternalistic piffle is just one more piece of grotesque bad faith on an issue about which the Liberal record is one of lying, scheming and wrecking at every step for over two decades.

Richard Flanagan

Politics is the art of convincing people to forget the lesser of two evils is also evil.

Edward Snowden

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

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

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

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

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

Scientific literacy is an intellectual vaccine against the claims of charlatans who would exploit ignorance.

Neil deGrasse Tyson

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