Tim Soutphommasane famous quotes

We have a natural constant craving for leadership. Democracy is always a fragile and imperfect achievement. Yet a distinct feeling of malaise in our political culture lingers. There is something missing from our public debates.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#Leadership #Achievement #Political

There are many in public life who deserve only our praise and admiration. But there are too many who are products of a class that knows little other than spin and the machinations of politics. Little wonder that leadership of the transforming sort is so hard to come by. The danger is that this may be permanent. Where our best people shun politics because the profession isn't honoured as it once was, this only serves to make the profession even less honoured.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#Leadership #Class #People

I'm not so sure liberal democracy as we know it has reached its terminus. It's clear though, that many have genuinely lost confidence in the Australian political class. One reason is that we like to place enormous burdens of expectations on modern political leaders. To be sure such expectations aren't always honest. Just as we want better public services but object to paying the higher taxes that would make them possible, we often want leadership but only if there aren't hard choices with real consequences.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#Leadership #Real #Class

People should not be responding to bigoted ugliness with any ugliness of their own.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#People #Should #Responding

We know that a large majority of the Australian society is extremely comfortable with a multicultural society, that we accept that living in a democracy means having a freedom to practise your religion within the limits of the law.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#Mean #Multicultural Society #Law

If anyone has engaged unlawful activity, they should be held to account with the full force of the law.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#Law #Should #Force

Anti-Muslim protests represent a fringe of our society that's seeking to promote hatred and division.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#Hatred #Division #Our Society

You can protest, you can protest peacefully, but keep things civil.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#Protest

No-one wants to see violence of any kind on our streets, certainly not any violence that's justified by extreme nationalist ideas or that targets people because of their religion.
-- Tim Soutphommasane

#Ideas #People #Target

Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God's side, for God is always right.

No man is good enough to govern another man without the other's consent.

First steps are always the hardest but until they are taken the notion of progress remains only a notion and not an achievement.

It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement.

Superior technical achievements - used correctly both strategically and tactically - can beat any quantity numerically many times stronger yet technically inferior.

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

No matter what political reasons are given for war, the underlying reason is always economic.

In the past, I used to counter any such notions by asking myself: 'Would you really want President Hattersley?' I now find that possibility rather cheers me up. With his chubby, Dickensian features and his knowledge of T.H. Green and other harmless leftish political classics, Hattersley might not be such a bad thing after all.

A man who has made up his mind on a given subject twenty-five years ago and continues to hold his political opinions after he has been proved to be wrong is a man of principle; while he who from time to time adapts his opinions to the changing circumstances of life is an opportunist.

A modern revolutionary group heads for the television station.