Michael Leunig Quotes

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Michael Leunig

Profession : Cartoonist

Birth : June 2, 1945

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.

Michael Leunig

Humanity hungers for the uncommon.

Michael Leunig

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, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy.

Michael Leunig

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

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

A world view is probably an expression of self.

Michael Leunig

I don't think I have spiritual beliefs in the structured sense - but I believe in the absolute necessity of spirit and a healthy spiritual life. It grew inside me by itself, which is surely the very nature of spirit, and instinctively I protected and nourished it. I also absorbed spirituality by osmosis.

Michael Leunig

I never had a spirit-breaking, soul-destroying religion drummed into me.

Michael Leunig

The work of the artist is to express what is repressed or even to speak the unspoken grief of society.

Michael Leunig

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.

Michael Leunig

How many times have I heard people say, 'I became very ill a couple of years ago; it got very serious, and I look back and give thanks for how it changed me and the truth I found.'

Michael Leunig

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

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

Michael Leunig

I was a reflective child.

Michael Leunig

I give thanks for the fact that I can get this stick with a bit of steel nib on the end, dip it in some black carbon stuff, and draw on paper. Now, people did it the same way 2,000 years ago. And there's something lovely about that play, and making mud pies and a mess. That's a lovely privilege.

Michael Leunig

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

Michael Leunig

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

Where do I get my information from? Well, I get it from the radio, and I get it from the newspaper, and then I get it from my conversations, and I get it from the paddocks around the bush. I get it; it turns up. You'd be most surprised how it turns up.

Michael Leunig

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