Quotes from Geoffrey Blainey

I am not superwoman. The reality of my daily life is that I am juggling a lot of balls in the air? And sometimes some of the balls get dropped.

When two nations had a contradictory assessment of their own military power and the issue at state was vital to both nations, war was likely.

It is the problem of accurately measuring the relative power of nations which goes far to explain why wars occur. War is a dispute about the measurement of power. War marks the choice of a new set of weights and measures.

On the eve of each war at least one of the nations miscalculated its bargaining power. In that sense every war comes from a misunderstanding. And in that sense every war is an accident.

While military and economic might was vital to the success of the United States, the power of its pale empire of ideas was probably even more pervasive.

Wars can only occur when two nations decide that they can gain more by fighting than by negotiating. War can only begin and can only continue with the consent of at least two nations.

Ironically Britain claimed the whole continent simply in order to claim a few isolated harbours astride trade routes. It was like a speculator who, buying a huge wasteland flanking a highway because it had a few fine sites for road cafes and filling stations, found later that much of the land was fertile and productive.

The present viewpoint is that Stalin proved to be the most resolute leader, that the Soviet Union exerted undue influence in reshaping the map of postwar Europe, and that a war purportedly begun to defend the independence of small European nations ended up by sacrificing them. The question — did Stalin outwit and outjostle Roosevelt and Churchill — will remain one of the enigmas of the 20th century.

In December 1941, when Australians began to sense that they were plunged into a new environment, the spectacles they had carried out from Britain were obsolete. They needed spectacles that would correct short-sightedness. They had to see the environment they were in as clearly as the environment they had left across the world.

Much of Australia's history had been shaped by the contradiction that it depended intimately and comprehensively on a country which was further away that almost any other in the world. Now the dependence had slackened, the distance had diminished. The Antipodes were drifting, though where they were drifting no one knew.

Innovation is usually not a gigantic step but a series of small jumps involving various enterprising people whose names are soon forgotten.

If, on the eve of the war, a fortune teller had pointed to all the Australian men between the ages of 20 and 30, and had predicted that a number equal to 60 per cent of that age group would be killed or permanently disabled in the coming war, she would have been ridiculed but she would have been correct.

The birth of the 20th century was like a flaming sunrise. More was expected of the century than any other. So much had been achieved in the previous one that it seemed sensible to expect that henceforth the world's triumphs would far outweigh the disasters.

The rush of events in the Soviet Union, Germany, eastern Europe and China in the late 1980s and the very early 1990s had no parallel in modern history. During the last thousand years no other formidable empire in a time of comparative peace had been dissolved so quickly, so unexpectedly, as the Soviet Union.

Christianity probably has been the most important institution in the world in the last 2000 years. It has achieved more for western civilisation than has any other factor; it has helped far more people than it has harmed.

Australia's distance from Europe was probably only tolerable because it had strategic commodities which England, threatened by changing European alliances, might some day be unable to produce in the northern hemisphere. Flax was the first conqueror — a hollow conqueror — of the distance which so often shaped Australia's destiny.

Immigration is everyone's business: it is one of the most important national issues. The idea that it is too dangerous to be debated is a mockery of democracy. It is too important not to debate.

The First World War shook the scaffolding of progress because it was deadly and unexpectedly long: it showed that technology could be two-faced. The war delivered one other insidious attack on the idea of progress by raising a moral question which the believers in progress had taken for granted: had the morality of Europeans improved during the long era of 'progress'?

If we disown history we are at its mercy. To have a reasonable knowledge of the past is to possess an anchor which is likely to prevent us from being swept towards false ideas about the present and future.

The new way of life called for a discipline and a succession of duties that contrasted with the freedom of the gatherers and hunters... The domesticating of plants and animals was a two-way process.

For ages the Aborigines had relied heavily on isolation. It was their asset and their liability, and gave them long-term control of the continent. But if their isolation were to end, as it ultimately had to end with a shrinking world, their whole way of life could be fractured. Even the arrival of a few thousand permanent settlers, whether from Europe or Asia, would be like the first tremors of an earthquake.

Democracy is a freak condition in the world's history: civil liberties are not common liberties even today, and most people in the world have never possessed them.

War and peace are not separate compartments. Peace depends on threats and force; often peace is the crystallisation of past force.

No wars are unintended or 'accidental'. What is often unintended is the length and bloodiness of the war.