David Lange Quotes
-
...an economic ignoramus unfit to oversee a fifty-cent raffle.
-
I had been brought up in the law and had this sort of instinct that international law operates and was there to protect principles and not to be the plaything of power and might - which I now know, of course, to be an absolute nonsense. International law should be spelled l-o-r-e.
-
My back is so scar-tissued that you couldn't find a place to slip a knife.
-
What a friend we have in cheeses.
-
An itinerant masseur, massaging the politically erogenous zones.
-
If the American global strategy is dependent on the ability of nuclear ships to come to New Zealand, then God defend the world.
-
You have to talk about why things happened the way they did. You can't actually explain my political life except by a series of situations rather than by some carefully constructed, rigidly progressed ascendancy.
-
Once while waiting at Auckland airport, Lange insisted on buying himself a newspaper and joined a queue at a newsstand. The woman in front of him turned around and said, 'Good God!' Lange replied affably, 'No madam, you are mistaken. I have never made that claim.'
-
The statement which has been made by the Leader of the Opposition was that the intelligence has stopped. I don't know whether that was a personal confession or whether it was a statement of position.
-
And I'm going to give it to you if you hold your breath just for a moment … I can smell the uranium on it as you lean towards me.
-
On seeing a machine labelled 'media steriliser', Lange quipped: 'Have that sent to my office immediately.'
-
'I've got two shirts still missing from the Bahamas. I'm sure they are part of a youth camping programme somewhere in Tanzania by now.'
-
One minute I was a clapped-out, two-guinea, legal-aid lawyer, and the next minute I was in parliament.
-
Bassett was a member of parliament and a cousin on my father's side of the family. My father delivered him and it became plain in later days that he must have dropped him.
-
After that, whenever I drove past Mangakahia, I would empty my ashtray — and I was a heavy smoker in those days — on the road outside the hall.
-
Death is very, very terminal.
-
'a man whose life is so boring that if it flashed past he wouldn't be in it'
-
...a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism.