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

Not all right-wing extremist hate speech ends in violence. But all right-wing extremist violence starts with hate speech.

Bill Shorten

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

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

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

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'

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

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’.

Joseph Stiglitz

Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.

John Stuart Mill

Moral cowardice and intellectual corruption are the natural concomitants of unchallenged privilege.

Noam Chomsky