Quotes from Don Watson

Hubris is an incurable American disease. As incurable as the military-industrial machine that keeps coming up with the armaments that make wars seem like slam dunks, but which last for decades; wars that are fought by a very small percentage of the population and, regular effusive acknowledgement of veterans notwithstanding, can be ignored for years.

Decried every day as a feckless thing without initiative or ambition, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as private enterprise, government became that thing. First sequester its responsibilities, sell off its functions, grant it no respect; run it into the ground and then declare it incompetent.

Michael Young, the English sociologist who coined the term "meritocracy," despised the fashion for it: first, because it is largely a smug fantasy perpetuated by those who sit at the top of the social pyramid; and second, because it bestows on those at the bottom the slur that they are there because they have no merit. Even feudalism spared the poor that insult: their lowly station was an accident of birth.

The strip runs forever along the Gulf Coast, and it makes you wonder why, on the night of Katrina, the Holy Comforter didn't take the opportunity to make a more comprehensive town-planning statement.

Crockery has been withdrawn from American culture below a certain level.

Similarly, dubbing everyone whose reading of history leads them to conclusions different from the preferred ones black-armband historians; channelling frustrations felt by the politically powerless to the politically correct; isolating chattering classes and elites from a pretended mainstream – all these and many terms of political abuse are common and inevitable in democracies – and all have parallels in tyrannies.

When the words are suspicious, go after them, insist they tell us what they mean. Go after the meaning of the words. And if the speakers say they are the kind who call things as they see them, that they don't mince words, and call a spade a spade if not a bloody shovel, go after them even harder. They're often the worst liars of the lot.

Kitsch and tourism are inseparable partners. Perhaps it is because, by definition, both are inauthentic.

Capuchin monkeys have no faith in America; they hold to no dream

You know what you did? You embraced the insanity you were telling us about. – Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street

Nimbin now continues life in its post-Aquarian form as an icon of alternative living, or, taking the view from the street as a measure, a fossilised relic of hippiedom, a marijuana-pickled, bad-taste rural slum.

Across the continent since Europeans first arrived, 92 per cent of old-growth forest has been destroyed. The

The prolonged solitary exposure to the bush that makes some people odd or crazy might in others bring the active and contemplative life into perfect harmony or grace.

Outside half a dozen youthful demonstrators chanted about the rights of the 'young unemployed'. The Prime Minister excepted, they were the best dressed people in West Torrens. There is no disguising a Young Liberal's haircut.

Yet it remains a commonplace of the official Australian worldview that all that is distinct and admirable in the national character and belief comes from the bush. It made Australians what they are.

Pictures rule, but words define, explain, express, direct, and hold together our thoughts and what we know.

I remember trying not to disrupt everyone else in the room, fumbling around trying to figure out how to use the medium with a beautiful model disrobed in front of me.