Quotes by Michael Leunig | Best Quotes of All Time

"It is known that wildfires behave unpredictably - this is fundamental - but it is my experience that humans in the presence of wildfire are also likely to behave in aberrant and unpredictable ways."

Michael Leunig

Experience Unpredictable Wildfire

"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."

Michael Leunig

Enough Three Company Sense

"In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science."

Michael Leunig

Good Science Art Culture

"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."

Michael Leunig

Man Power Earth Control

"On Anzac Day, coffee and jokes with a Turk might be the most meaningful and fair dinkum dawn service you could possibly have."

Michael Leunig

You Day Coffee Service

"There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon."

Michael Leunig

Art Great World Like

"I have not much love for the bright lights - unless it's the sun creeping up over the horizon."

Michael Leunig

Love Sun Horizon Bright

"Any cartoon that can be liked by a committee is really not worth drawing; in fact, must not be drawn at all! Better to become a stockbroker."

Michael Leunig

Better Drawing Must Committee

"Darkness is full of possibility."

Michael Leunig

Darkness Full Possibility

"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."

Michael Leunig

You Growth Crazy Will

"If the nose has become a deeply disillusioned and grief-stricken organ in the modern world, then what of the ear? The poor little ear - such an innocent, intelligent and sensitive creature; in these times of such flagrant sonic brutality, the sense within the ear has much to contend with."

Michael Leunig

World Poor Innocent Brutality

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

Michael Leunig

Positive You Time Bad

"What a magical thing is the bed, and what a vulnerable, innocent creature is the sleeping human - the human who never looks more truthful or pitiful or benign; the curled-up, childlike dreaming soul who has for a few hours become an angel adrift."

Michael Leunig

Soul Never Angel Innocent

"There can be many reasons to travel, but wandering into the world for no particular reason is a sublime madness, which in all its whimsy and pointlessness may depict the story of life - and indeed could be a useful model to keep in mind, seeing as so much of life's ambition comes unstuck or leads to nothing much at all."

Michael Leunig

Life World Mind Travel

"It's a consoling notion that death is a very tiny hole, and you need to make yourself very small to get through it. One obviously needs to lighten off, and a rucksack full of bricks or a mantelpiece full of trophies will certainly have to be abandoned - the sooner the better, I say."

Michael Leunig

Death You Yourself Better

"The hypocrisy of some is that we like to think of ourselves as sophisticated and evolved, but we're still also driven by primal urges like greed and power."

Michael Leunig

Power Think Greed Like

"The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination."

Michael Leunig

Relationship Fear Imagination Candle

"I sense that the road to Heaven is paved with dashed hopes."

Michael Leunig

Heaven Road Sense Hopes

"The 'economy' became a god such as never before, and a happy, successful society was one that could please this god - sometimes by sacrificing beautiful things - to keep the deity from getting angry and harming the people by withdrawing favours."

Michael Leunig

Beautiful God People Society

"A society that's provided for by television is a society that says it doesn't need too many parks or natural situations for children to play in because television will look after them."

Michael Leunig

Society Look Children Will

"Like normal people, leftists now have to get up in the morning and earn a living, seeing as the fascists have come down so hard on social welfare fraud, and this is the cruel reality. The good old days are gone, and increasingly, leftists are to be found working in ordinary, proper jobs."

Michael Leunig

Good Morning People Reality

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

Michael Leunig

Good Great Look View

"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."

Michael Leunig

Life Death Truth Passion

"Practically every technology that is ever invented is touted as being the new savior, the thing that will bring peace and goodwill to the earth, but immediately it falls into other hands who see it as the opportunity to promote the very opposite."

Michael Leunig

Peace Technology Opportunity New

"A beautiful wake-up is one of life's most perfectly happy times."

Michael Leunig

Life Beautiful Happy Most

"I must warn you right here and now that I am a 'wet leftie,' a 'leftist' and also a member of the 'bleeding heart liberal left.' I had no say in it whatsoever. I woke up one morning, and these things were tattooed across my forehead."

Michael Leunig

Heart You Morning I Am

"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."

Michael Leunig

Feel Alive Nervous Offended

"People seem to take as much offence as they possibly can these days - it's almost a new type of greed, a new kind of road rage."

Michael Leunig

People New Road Greed

"In some ways, calm bodily protest has a nakedness to it that may be deeply embarrassing for observers; an act not unlike the bare-faced Oliver Twist effrontery that stands vulnerably before authority, asking for more or better."

Michael Leunig

Calm Better More Authority

"Wisdom may best arise from a humbling reality."

Michael Leunig

Wisdom Best Reality May

"All nations that throw their military weight around, occupying neighboring lands and treating the residents with callous and humiliating disregard, are already sliding towards the dark possibilities in human nature."

Michael Leunig

Nature Dark Human Possibilities

"If you know anything about ducks, you know a baby duck will imprint itself on you. It misses its mother."

Michael Leunig

You Will Anything Duck

"I have sometimes done cartoons that are hurtful to people - immature, spiteful stuff. Some are so self-indulgent, and some have just failed. I look back and sometimes cringe. But one regret as I get older is that I haven't been radical and wild enough."

Michael Leunig

People Regret Look Enough

"Avoiding maturity is, for many men, not just a cute hobby, but a life's work - often handsomely rewarded in the infantile popular culture of the West."

Michael Leunig

Life Work Culture Maturity

"All the world loves a young emerging artist, and sometimes it seems that all the world wants to be one - on a bad, gloomy planet, to be colourful and creative seems so promising."

Michael Leunig

World Bad Sometimes Artist

"What really irks me is the snide victimizing suggestion from some that I have tried to be lighthearted and funny... Oh my God - this is so offensive."

Michael Leunig

Funny God Me Tried

"The disasters of war can be infinitely eerie and poignant."

Michael Leunig

War Poignant Eerie Disasters

"I think we live in delusional times, whether it's with a great ability to totally distract ourselves with technology, or with speed and the velocity of life."

Michael Leunig

Life Technology Great Think

"The relentless invisible storm of radio signals and electronic particles, the hustle and bustle, and the billions of petrol explosions in the engine blocks of trucks and cars seem to churn up the molecules of life and heaven so violently that the beautiful fogs are unable to hold together like they once did."

Michael Leunig

Life Beautiful Together Storm

"The child who has no need to feign empirical knowledge about life can wonder and fantasise with great ease. The world is his oyster, or any other thing he wants it to be."

Michael Leunig

Life Knowledge Great World

"A world view is probably an expression of self."

Michael Leunig

World View Self Expression

"Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the healthy personality - which indeed may be a rare achievement."

Michael Leunig

Personality Achievement Rare About

"Perhaps the more benign and poetic sense of God is established when we are babies in the moments of primal joy we might call 'the epiphanies of infancy' - the sensation of being blissfully held and feeling complete and at one with everything - yet having no words or no need to say it but instead to just assimilate the feeling."

Michael Leunig

God Joy Words Feeling

"The scariness of manhood to males may be symbolically seen in the many stories of indigenous Australian boys who ran away and hid in the bush as the time of initiation approached."

Michael Leunig

Time Who Indigenous May

"A lot of mothers want to be with their children. They can't afford it for this reason or that reason."

Michael Leunig

Children Want Reason Afford

"Perhaps life is actually more confusing and unknowable to an adult than a child, but grown-ups have learned to deceive themselves and act as if they understand what's going on; and some are elected to high office on the basis of their ability to create this impression."

Michael Leunig

Life More Ability Act

"When I was a boy, my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father."

Michael Leunig

Wise Me Man Wise Man

"Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works."

Michael Leunig

Art Man Poetry Sadness

"There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there."

Michael Leunig

You Brain Imagination Feel

Michael Leunig

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