Most people can do extraordinary things if they have the confidence or take the risks. Yet most people
Marx was wrong. Religion is not the opiate of the people. Opium suggests something soporific, numbing, dulling. Too often religion has been an aphrodisiac for horror, a Benzedrine for bestiality. At its best it has lifted spirits and raised spires. At its worst it has turned entire civilizations into cemeteries.
The Internet provides a delivery system for pathological states of mind.
Advertising men and politicians are dangerous if they are separated. Together they are diabolical.
The book can produce an addiction as fierce as heroin or nicotine, forcing us to spend much of our lives, like junkies, in book shops and libraries, those literary counterparts to the opium den.
The events of September 11 were carried out by people armed not with weapons of mass destruction, but with blades you can buy at a newsagent
The most intense hatreds are not between political parties but within them.
Today, words. Tomorrow, sticks and stones. And the day after that?
Fame often comes to those who are thinking about something else, whereas celebrity comes to those who think about nothing else. Celebrity is, if you like, a forgery of fame: it has the form but lacks the content.
While sticks and stones break bones, words can never hurt? Manifestly untrue. Politics everywhere are holistic, interconnected, and the rhetoric of right or left can produce toxic atmospheres in which lunacy thrives.
Later, in a different home, I befriended a eucalypt, using a resilient bough as a trampoline. Learning nothing from having plummeted from the peppercorn, I'd bounce happily in my haven in the heavens. I loved that tree - and fully understand why Heysen, Roberts, McCubbin and the rest devoted so much time and effort to painting arboreal portraits.
Unless you are willing to try, fail miserable, and try again, success won't happen.
The old dead trees are the most fascinating - the countless trees lying in the gullies and up the hills that fell perhaps a century ago, pulling up their roots from the earth as they toppled. The great upheavals left rocks in their huge tentacles and, as they slowly rot, the trunks are home to populations of creatures, from goannas to wild pigs. As grey as tombstones in a cemetery they lie there, having outlasted generations of farmers, as they'll outlast me. In their own way they are as beautiful, more beautiful, than living trees.
To many people holidays are not voyages of discovery, but a ritual of reassurance.
It's a privilege to present 'Late Night Live'. No radio program, anywhere on Earth, casts a wider net.
Trees are very good friends. Firm friends. My five year olds tree could be relied upon to be there next day, uncritical and protective. And think of trees contribution to our lives. They provide boats, buildings, paper, furniture and, for clog-wearers, footwear. As well as contributing toothpicks and chopsticks they give little birdies somewhere comfy to sit. Best of all, they help produce breathable air and lock up that naughty carbon. Why is why I am talking to the Greens about giving trees the vote.
When I was five, a tree was my best friend. An old peppercorn on Grandpa's little farm. I'd haul myself into its calloused arms and hide from the world in its foliage. Apart from the pleasure of looking down on unsuspecting adults, I could be Robin Hood in a one-tree Sherwood Forest or Johnny Weissmuller in his jungle. I fell out of my friend once while Tarzan-ing. Gashed a large chunk from a leg. Almost 70 years later, there's still a scar.
Let the massacres remind us to turn down our political volume and venom.
Sport provides the spectacle, the metaphor, the religious ritual, the putty to fill the cracks in countless lives.
