John Howard Quotes

I've never believed in lower wages. Never. Never believed in lower wages, I've never believed in lower wages as an economic instrument.

I brought a philosophical road map to government. It was bitterly opposed by some but, for a long time, supported by more. Both supporters and critics knew what I stood for.

When I became Prime Minister nine years ago, I believed that this nation was defining its place in the world too narrowly. My Government has rebalanced Australia's foreign policy to better reflect the unique intersection of history, geography, culture and economic opportunity that our country represents. Time has only strengthened my conviction that we do not face a choice between our history and our geography.

In the years that have gone by there’s been the constant claim that we went to war based on a lie... There was no lie. There were errors in intelligence, but there was no lie.

I don't think it is wrong, racist, immoral or anything, for a country to say 'we will decide what the cultural identity and the cultural destiny of this country will be and nobody else'.

I accept that climate change is a challenge, I accept the broad theory about global warming. I am sceptical about a lot of the more gloomy predictions.

I accept that in a free society you have to justify reductions in people's liberties. I accept that, bearing in mind my starting point is that the most important human right is the right to life...

In a sense, it's always a sombre moment in a country where you ask the people who have done the right thing to put up with inconvenience because a limited number of people have done the wrong thing, but that is the nature of a democratic society.

I have never been persuaded by those who claim that the road to good government is via taking more and more decisions out of the hands of the people’s elected representatives. In our parliamentary democracy, politicians are elected to make decisions on behalf of the community. They are elected by the people and, ultimately, they are answerable to the people for the decisions they make. To draw these decisions away from the legislature and the executive and to invest them in the hands of the judiciary would irrevocably change our democracy. And it would hamper our ability to respond to changes in a way that reflects the realities we now face.

I think history will judge him very harshly for not having seized the opportunity in the year 2000 to embrace the offer that was very courageously made by the then Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Barack, which involved the Israelis agreeing to 90 per cent of what the Palestinians had wanted.

Leadership of the Liberal Party is a great honour, of which I remain profoundly conscious. It is, moreover, the unique gift of the party room.

Truth is absolute, truth is supreme, truth is never disposable in national political life.

The 'black armband' view of our history reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. I take a very different view. I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud of than which we should be ashamed.

A conservative is someone who does not think he is morally superior to his grandfather.

Australia wins respect in the world when we display who we are and not what self-appointed cultural dieticians would want us to become. Multiculturalism is not our national cement. Rather it is the Australian achievement, which has many components.