Michael Leunig Quotes

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Michael Leunig

Profession : Cartoonist

Birth : June 2, 1945

Integrity is an ecosystem.

Michael Leunig

I don't like to brag, but I must tell you that I am regarded in some circles as being in the upper echelons of the elite loony left.

Michael Leunig

A good memory is surely a compost heap that converts experience to wisdom, creativity, or dottiness; not that these things are of much earthly value, but at least they may keep you amused when the world is keeping you locked away or shutting you out.

Michael Leunig

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for.

Michael Leunig

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

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne.

Michael Leunig

All good art is seditious, but the people in authority can never recognise it. I think when you mention sedition, artists are the ones whose eyes light up thinking, 'Oh, yes, I want some of that!'

Michael Leunig

As we grow, we lift our gaze higher and higher, and then sometimes we are brought to our knees, but all is not lost; what we find on the ground can be very valuable and precisely what we need.

Michael Leunig

When all is said and done, it looks like the Palestinians have been massively robbed and abused, and are engaged in a desperate struggle for survival and liberation. Israel, on the other hand, would appear to be conducting an imperialistic campaign of oppression supported and substantially armed by the most powerful nation on earth.

Michael Leunig

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

Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing, but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there.

Michael Leunig

Wars don't happen on battlefields; they go on happening in people's hearts for generations and generations, and the ecological damage is unfathomably complex and dire.

Michael Leunig

Pre-Christmas is very important, and it is stressful, and, you know, even in the biblical story... travelling on the donkey in a stressful environment.

Michael Leunig

Every child is a greedy child, I think. I mean, it's healthy to be a greedy child.

Michael Leunig

I never really understood who the Magi were as a child. What is a Magi? Not a word I would use, but a magpie I could understand.

Michael Leunig

Sometimes a witticism has no truth behind it.

Michael Leunig

I had a few ducks as a kid.

Michael Leunig

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

Michael Leunig

Apparently, the pathfinder duck is a psychological archetype in certain cultures.

Michael Leunig

Muftis and bishops should be like ripe camembert cheeses - a bit on the nose and not for the faint-hearted, but memorable!

Michael Leunig