Paul Keating Quotes

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Paul Keating

Profession : Politician

Birth : January 18, 1944

When the Berlin Wall came down the Americans cried, 'Victory,' and walked off the field.

Paul Keating

The United States being in Asia is unambiguously a good thing for the region.

Paul Keating

What we have to do is make our way in Asia ourselves with an independent foreign policy. Our future is basically in the region around us in South East Asia.

Paul Keating

The great curse of modern political life is incrementalism.

Paul Keating

I try to use the Australian idiom to its maximum advantage.

Paul Keating

The essence of leadership is essentially taking the responsibility of trying to interpret the future to the present.

Paul Keating

I always believed in burning up the government's political capital, not being Mr Safe Guy, you know?

Paul Keating

Russia alone has the capacity to obliterate the United States.

Paul Keating

The death of Malcolm Fraser underwrites a great loss to Australia. Notwithstanding a controversial prime ministership, in later years he harboured one abiding and important idea about Australia - its need and its right to be a strategically independent country.

Paul Keating

If one takes pride in one's craft, you won't let a good thing die. Risking it through not pushing hard enough is not a humility.

Paul Keating

You get one chance to do something about native title. You get perhaps one chance in your life to do something about a republic. You get one chance, your chance, to build a piece of the political architecture in the Pacific. I wasn't going to give those up.

Paul Keating

You see, before I became prime minister, the Australian prime minister only attended ever two meetings in the world: the British Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting and the South Pacific Forum.

Paul Keating

You know, in the WikiLeaks cables, the Chinese discovered that Kevin Rudd was urging the Americans to keep the military option open against them. This is hardly a friendly gesture.

Paul Keating

Well, Australians should speak for the national interests of Australia, and whatever role former Australian prime ministers may have, one of the things you do is speak frankly about the country as you see the country's best interests, you know?

Paul Keating

I've always held the view that great states need strategic space. I mean, George Washington took his space from George III. Britain took it from just about everybody. Russia took all of Eastern Europe. Germany's taken it from everywhere they can, and China will want its space too.

Paul Keating

Nobody wants to have in their CV in the upper echelons of the American economic family that they nationalised major banks.

Paul Keating

The G7, just a European centric show, an Atlantic show, is fundamentally finished.

Paul Keating

In the end, rational policy is always good.

Paul Keating

When we were actually in the Keating reform era, the Business Council was of no help.

Paul Keating

What distinguished the First World War from all wars before it was the massive power of the antagonists.

Paul Keating