It is our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them, and have the honesty to say to people, 'There are no easy solutions here.'
Interpretation
Politics requires honesty and acknowledgment of complex issues without oversimplifying them.
In this quote, Malcolm Turnbull emphasizes the responsibility of political leaders to confront significant challenges and provide transparent explanations to the public. He warns against the temptation to offer simple, comforting solutions to complicated problems, advocating instead for a candid discussion about the complexities and realities of governance.
In practice
Using this quote in a political debate to emphasize the importance of addressing complex issues honestly.
Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment - whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.
What you've got to do is recognize that you don't control everything for a start, you've got to play the cards you're dealt, the hand of cards you're dealt, as best you can, and that's what I always seek to do.
The question of whether or to what extent human activities are causing global warming is not a matter of ideology, let alone of belief. The issue is simply one of risk management.
I am an ambitious person, but I am not ambitious in the sense that I want jobs only for the sake of them... I am here to do things I think are worthwhile. I am always careful that the political positions I take are consistent with good policy. I would not want to be prime minister of Australia at any price.
All political power comes from the barrel of either guns, pussy, or opium pipes, and people seem to like it that way.
We won't organize any black man to be a Democrat or a Republican because both of them have sold us out. Both of them have sold us out; both parties have sold us out. Both parties are racist, and the Democratic Party is more racist than the Republican Party.
At the turn of the last century, extremists were forced back to the political fringes while younger politicians resurrected the vitality of the original Republican vision. They recognized that the nation could only develop and grow by protecting equality of opportunity for hardworking Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder.
The necessity of reciprocal checks in the exercise of political power, by dividing and distributing it into different depositories, and constituting each the guardian of the public weal against invasions by the others, has been evinced by experiments ancient and modern, some of them in our country and under our own eyes.
We must be the great arsenal of Democracy.
All of us can agree that we want government to work as well as possible, and we should all applaud efforts to improve it. But there is no escaping the divisive and essential questions: What is the purpose of the state, and whom does it serve?
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.