Quotes from Michael Leunig

You wouldn't wish hardship on anyone, but when it comes, you would be crazy not to see the huge growth that will come from it.

My father was a meat worker. He was a union organizer in the meat workers union.

Meat workers may have been looked down upon socially, but at least they were well-paid and were a fit and lively bunch as a result of hard, honest physical work.

A dear friend of my early childhood has worked as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea for much of her life, and from the tiny island where her main work has been focused, she has brought me many funny and beautiful stories over the years.

Love a single an additional and you will be satisfied. It really is as easy and as challenging as that.

I was a reflective child.

What modern humans need help with is escaping from the despair of politics, commerce and media, escaping from the drabness and oppressiveness of worldly values and seeing through suburban mentality and normal community standards so that they can find some much-needed relief for their wilting souls.

In nicey-nicey land, you must be happy-clappy and positive all the time - bad news is taboo.

At my advanced age, I know I am not an anti-Semite, not even vaguely or remotely, but others would seem to know better, as false accusers always do.

When people talk about their God, it is difficult to know what they actually mean, and when people talk about their atheism, it is usually incomprehensible also.

I increasingly wonder whether most humans are in a constant state of unconsciously fearing each other. Perhaps they fear how intimately different other people might be to them, and the problem is that there is no real way of finding out just how huge that difference might be.

Humans are nervous, touchy creatures and can be easily offended. Many are deeply insecure. They become focused and energized by taking offence; it makes them feel meaningful and alive.

The insatiable need for heartless power and ruthless control is the telltale sign of an uninitiated man - the most irresponsible, incompetent and destructive force on earth.

A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light.

Clever modern man is so witless that he thinks moral silence and empty conscience are an advantage.

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view.

Stay out of the loop, the club, the inner circle.

Integrity is an ecosystem.

Two's company and three's a crowd, but seven can be an uprising. And the seven can become 70 or 700 or 7000 very quickly if the sense of being wronged is felt broadly and truly enough.

At last, after completing year 12, I failed the great final examination, repeated the following year and failed again even more dismally than before. This was not an easy thing to do. My mates did the simple thing in the first place and mainly passed with honours and went on to have remarkably successful lives.

Easter is not limited to the passion and death of Christ; it also includes the dismal tragedy of life unlived by the many, and all the loss of passion and truth that goes with it.

In order to be truthful we must do more than speak the truth. We must also hear truth, receive truth, search for truth.

To be a pleasant person, you would at least need to see the point of being a pleasant person, or have it explained to you at some sort of 'finishing school' where you could actually learn the laws of propriety and the skills of appearing well-adapted, easygoing and attractively trouble free. But where do you learn these things? I don't know.

In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.