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.
Valery Legasov
August 9, 2019
Not all right-wing extremist hate speech ends in violence. But all right-wing extremist violence starts with hate speech.
Bill Shorten
August 4, 2019
There’s a wages crisis,
Morrison attacks unions;
There is a poverty crisis,
Morrison attacks the unemployed;
There’s an environmental crisis,
Morrison attacks environmentalists;
There’s a crisis of corruption in our democracy,
Morrison attacks journalists.
See the pattern?
Ben Davison
August 4, 2019
Science is the most durable and nondivisive way of thinking about the human circumstance. It transcends cultural, national and political boundaries. You don’t have American science versus Canadian science versus Japanese science.
Sam Harris
August 3, 2019
I think the Australian government must be one of the most ignorant governments I’ve ever seen, in the sense, right across the board, on immigration or about anything else, they’re totally unwilling to listen to science or logic.
Lord Deben
July 12, 2019
I understand that the solution is out there, that scientists are screaming it out, but it is being blocked by people who are making too much money off the way we run things now. We must change our path or face mass extinction and the time to act was yesterday. [The Monthly, July, 2019, p. 23]
'Violet'
July 8, 2019
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
Aldous Huxley
June 23, 2019
Globalisation and trade liberalisation were supposed to make us all better off through the mechanism of trickle-down economics. What we seemed to be seeing instead was trickle-up economics, accompanied by a destruction of democratic politics, as we moved ever closer to a system of ‘one dollar, one vote’ as opposed to ‘one person, one vote’.
