Randolph Bedford Quotes

For we have here a beautiful land that none could e’er knock down,
The brightest jewel that ever was known in dear old George's crown;
The brightest jewel that ever was known and never can be a failure.
Although the damn Labor party is doing its best to ruin Australia...

At the age of five I had begun an association with Temperance Societies; which ended at the age of sixteen—when I discovered the goodness of beer.

The Bible was second nature; and I had great interest in its gallery of bad men, beloved of the Lord. At least they said they were. Abraham, who represented his wife as his sister, so as to curry favour with Abimelech; Abel the lazy shepherd, who annoyed Cain so that that energetic farmer had to kill him; Noah, who ‘digged a vineyard’ and told tall stories of navigation; Jacob, who refused his brother a meal until Esau signed away his rights; and David, that pious scoundrel, who sent Uriah to death, so that he might steal Bathsheba respectably.

Pretty as a picture and poor as a crow.

It is not without design that the monkey with the rainbow stern climbs high. It is the advertisement of his sex appeal, and he doesn't climb far unless there is an audience.

As salt as Lot's wife.

Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all.

To-day, a Minister receiving a deputation personally promises ‘consideration of Cabinet’, in a tone that makes the deputation believe it has succeeded. To the wise the old rule persists. If a Government says ‘Yes’, it means ‘Perhaps’; and if it says ‘Perhaps’, it means ‘No’.

Australia has a word for the s, a word that should be used the world over to describe a killjoy, and that word is ''.

The womenfolk of early immigrants to Queensland brought cactus in a pot, because it had a ‘pretty flower’, and the ‘prickly pear’ escaped from the pot and destroyed twenty million acres of the finest land in the State; until the cactoblastis was introduced, and destroyed the pear. An old lady—craving her old-world home—brought sweet briar to South Australia; and it accounted for a few million acres in its turn. A fool pastoralist, whose most coherent phrase was ‘Tally-ho!’ or ‘Yoicks!’ introduced the fox, which has almost wiped out the lyre bird; and another fool introduced the starling. Other pests introduced were Freetraders, sectarianism, water hyacinth and rabbits.

He had the biggest feet I have ever seen; larger feet even than the feet of that Brisbane man, of whom it was said that two large alligator skins had been sent from Cairns to make a pair of boots for him.

His moments of most sentimental recollection were when he thought of the beauty of the sausages he had manufactured.

It is a quaint fact that the mediocre critic demands, in the one breath, a Parliament representative of all the people, and a Parliament of all the virtues and intelligences. A Parliament of genius would not represent the people, who are emphatically not genius, and Parliaments as they are, with one or two men above the average intelligence, and many men of average intelligence, and more men little better than morons, represents the nation—any nation.

I read the other day that Hindenberg, waiting to see whether Hitler would secure leadership or not, said, ‘We will see how the cat will jump, with God’s help.’ I presume he meant that God would help him to vision, and not the cat to acrobatics; but one can see how the name of God becomes formula—to be used in every emergency, if only to give the emergency respectability. Hindenberg used the formula in everything. Eighteen months before the war ended, he and Ludendorf knew that they must fail; yet to save face they kept on losing two hundred thousand men a month, and ‘trusting in God.’

The Governor was a little pink old gentleman; so soft in the skin that he seemed to be stuffed with moss.