Good economics is good politics.
Paul KeatingRead
We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion. It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine that these things could be done to us.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on the historical injustices faced by Indigenous peoples due to colonial actions.
Paul Keating's quote addresses the painful legacy of colonization, highlighting the destructive impact on traditional Indigenous lands and cultures. It acknowledges the various forms of violence and discrimination imposed by colonizers, emphasizing the ignorance and prejudice that allowed such acts to occur, while also calling on readers to recognize their humanity and the shared responsibility for these historical wrongs.
Themes
ColonizationIndigenous RightsHistoryPrejudiceInjustice
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in discussions about reconciliation efforts in Australia.
More from Paul Keating
All quotes →Truth is, of its essence, liberating, as it is possessed of no contrivance or conceit - that it provides the only genuine basis for progress and that the future can only be found in truth.
Paul KeatingRead
The only reward in a public life is public progress. You stand back and say, 'What did I get out of it?' You look around, and the place is better, and that's it.
Paul KeatingRead
The more we view the country through the prism of Aboriginality, the more likely we are to get the angle right.
Paul KeatingRead
What the Anzac legend did do, by the bravery and sacrifice of our troops, was reinforce our own cultural notions of independence, mateship, and ingenuity. Of resilience and courage in adversity.
Paul KeatingRead
Similar quotes
I grew up in the middle of a block where there was an Irish grocery store on one corner, an Italian bar on another corner and the Nazi Party was on the third corner.
Andrew YoungRead
In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.
Henry Louis GatesRead
One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.
Douglas BrinkleyRead
Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.
John Henrik ClarkeRead
After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.
Bob WoodwardRead
The slightest acquaintance with history shows that powerful republics are the most warlike and unscrupulous of nations.
Ambrose BierceRead