Michael Leunig Quotes & Sayings

I never had a spirit-breaking, soul-destroying religion drummed into me. — Michael Leunig

For 13 years, I struggled with education and have only just realised that I was actually struggling to protect myself from it. I was trying to protect my soul. — Michael Leunig

God bless this tiny little boat, And me who travels in it. It stays afloat for years and years, And sinks within a minute. And so the soul in which we sail, Unknown by years of thinking, Is deeply felt and understood, The minute that it's sinking. — Michael Leunig

If European symbols and traditions have grown tired, perfunctory and oppressively banal in Australia, or been drained of spirit and meaning by the dreary dictates of materialism and secularity, then the raw spirit truth of our native land is alive and radiant by comparison. For joy and meaning we might well turn to our natural country and witness miracles of vitality and new life, of inspiration and profound beauty; all in some humble, quiet and improbable place. — Michael Leunig

While the world may feel entitled and have the power to pronounce an individual crazy, are there times when the innocent genius, the insightful individual or just the old grandmother may reasonably declare the world to be mad? Probably, but what hope or happiness would such an individual have? — Michael Leunig

Perhaps life is actually more confusing and unknowable to an adult than a child, but grown-ups have learned to deceive themselves and act as if they understand what's going on; and some are elected to high office on the basis of their ability to create this impression. — Michael Leunig

Falling down is a very big subject, and so is the concept of downfall. None of us escapes, and I have had my share of both. — Michael Leunig

Citizens, regardless of their political inclinations, carry a devout sense of their shared culture and its temperament - and, having contributed to it all their lives, hold decent and reasonable hopes for its continued integrity. — Michael Leunig

Life itself is offensive and certainly does not apologize - in fact, it hurts considerably and, as we all know, is often very rude and troublesome, just as nature or art can be. — Michael Leunig

I don't like to brag, but I must tell you that I am regarded in some circles as being in the upper echelons of the elite loony left. — Michael Leunig

If the nose has become a deeply disillusioned and grief-stricken organ in the modern world, then what of the ear? The poor little ear - such an innocent, intelligent and sensitive creature; in these times of such flagrant sonic brutality, the sense within the ear has much to contend with. — Michael Leunig

When all is said and done, it looks like the Palestinians have been massively robbed and abused, and are engaged in a desperate struggle for survival and liberation. Israel, on the other hand, would appear to be conducting an imperialistic campaign of oppression supported and substantially armed by the most powerful nation on earth. — Michael Leunig

Pre-Christmas is very important, and it is stressful, and, you know, even in the biblical story ... travelling on the donkey in a stressful environment. — Michael Leunig

There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there. — Michael Leunig

We may lose our memory as we get older, but this might not be such a bad thing - who wants to drag a mental junkyard around at a time of life when you're starting to grow interesting little wings? — Michael Leunig

Every child is a greedy child, I think. I mean, it's healthy to be a greedy child. — Michael Leunig

Wisdom may best arise from a humbling reality. — Michael Leunig

As a cartoonist, I am not interested in defending the dominant, the powerful, the well-resourced and the well-armed because such groups are usually not in need of advocacy, moral support or sympathetic understanding; they have already organised sufficient publicity for themselves and prosecute their points of view with great efficiency. — Michael Leunig

Over the years, my marks on paper have landed me in all sorts of courts and controversies - I have been comprehensively labelled; anti-this and anti-that, anti-social, anti-football, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-Semitic, anti-science, anti-republican, anti-American, anti-Australian - to recall just an armful of the antis. — Michael Leunig

How many times have I heard people say, 'I became very ill a couple of years ago; it got very serious, and I look back and give thanks for how it changed me and the truth I found.' — Michael Leunig

The child who has no need to feign empirical knowledge about life can wonder and fantasise with great ease. The world is his oyster, or any other thing he wants it to be. — Michael Leunig

What really irks me is the snide victimizing suggestion from some that I have tried to be lighthearted and funny ... Oh my God - this is so offensive. — Michael Leunig

A beautiful wake-up is one of life's most perfectly happy times. — Michael Leunig

All nations that throw their military weight around, occupying neighboring lands and treating the residents with callous and humiliating disregard, are already sliding towards the dark possibilities in human nature. — Michael Leunig

Sometimes I wonder if the semi-conscious agenda of the media is to get between people and their souls. It is the the soul with its myriad tiny nerve endings that notices the neglected pathos, poignancy and practicality that lies at the heart of life. It's as if the media are somehow irritated and envious that anonymous people should have the quiet brilliance of their rich and sustainable inner lives ... — Michael Leunig

I've learned to respect the whimsical. — Michael Leunig

There is some suffering that awaits us all. — Michael Leunig

Art, it seems to me, doesn't need freedom so much as it needs courage and love - some would call it 'soul' or 'Eros.' — Michael Leunig

I don't think I have spiritual beliefs in the structured sense - but I believe in the absolute necessity of spirit and a healthy spiritual life. It grew inside me by itself, which is surely the very nature of spirit, and instinctively I protected and nourished it. I also absorbed spirituality by osmosis. — Michael Leunig

Sanity is surely not about normality in the statistical sense: it is about an eternal and natural idea of the healthy personality - which indeed may be a rare achievement. — Michael Leunig

Pursuit is a rather desperate act in itself. There's something kind of frantic about the notion of pursuit. — Michael Leunig

Humanity hungers for the uncommon. — Michael Leunig

So few humans seem to fully exist themselves that I wonder if all this endless speculation and haggling about God is really an exploration of a more interesting and embarrassing question about ourselves. — Michael Leunig

Democracy just isn't working any more; without sanity at its heart, it is becoming a most unique and fiendish tyranny. — Michael Leunig

Like normal people, leftists now have to get up in the morning and earn a living, seeing as the fascists have come down so hard on social welfare fraud, and this is the cruel reality. The good old days are gone, and increasingly, leftists are to be found working in ordinary, proper jobs. — Michael Leunig

In later life, we don't easily talk of fears, but instead we discuss our 'concerns.' Fear seems too primal and hysterical, but concern is polite and intellectual and nicely under control. — Michael Leunig

My father was a meat worker. He was a union organizer in the meat workers union. — Michael Leunig

Where do I get my information from? Well, I get it from the radio, and I get it from the newspaper, and then I get it from my conversations, and I get it from the paddocks around the bush. I get it; it turns up. You'd be most surprised how it turns up. — Michael Leunig

I must warn you right here and now that I am a 'wet leftie,' a 'leftist' and also a member of the 'bleeding heart liberal left.' I had no say in it whatsoever. I woke up one morning, and these things were tattooed across my forehead. — Michael Leunig

Any cartoon that can be liked by a committee is really not worth drawing; in fact, must not be drawn at all! Better to become a stockbroker. — Michael Leunig

Humans are nervous, touchy creatures and can be easily offended. Many are deeply insecure. They become focused and energized by taking offence; it makes them feel meaningful and alive. — Michael Leunig

Einstein was a great advocate of the notion that good ideas look absurd at the beginning. Camus expressed a similar view. — Michael Leunig

I sense that the road to Heaven is paved with dashed hopes. — Michael Leunig

At the age of nine, I simultaneously fell in love with two Dutch sisters because they seemed so beautifully strange, and their clothes were mysterious and alluring - added to which, they could not speak a word of English. More than anything, I wanted to connect with them and embark on a vast journey of exploration. — Michael Leunig

For me, spirit is the impulse towards life, the Eros in a person leaping forward, whereas soul refers to something possibly long.. suffering, where meanings are made, where there is a sense of this gathering of perceptions, that our death is not the most important thing, nor our life. — Michael Leunig

What makes an interview 'difficult'? Well, there are many reasons, but the end result is usually the same: The guest just doesn't seem comfortable answering the question. — Michael Leunig

I just happen to believe that what's at stake in the early child's development is so vital and so important, and I think it is founded in the main, in the broad cultural sense, on the relationship between the mother and child. — Michael Leunig

Easter is reflecting upon suffering for one thing, but it also reflects upon Jesus and his non compliance in the face of great authority where he holds to his truth - so there's two stories there. — Michael Leunig

Art, like religion, arises from the spirit, but alas, the formalizing of spiritual life all too often ends in hypocrisy. — Michael Leunig

It is at Easter that Jesus is most human, and like all humans, he fails and is failed. His is not an all-powerful God, it is an all-vulnerable God. — Michael Leunig

There are moments when great music can be the greatest service and charity. — Michael Leunig

Sometimes a witticism has no truth behind it. — Michael Leunig

A street full of electric light is a sign of civic failure and is an insulting injury to the soul. Shutting out the night is as disastrous as shutting out the light. — Michael Leunig

If you know anything about ducks, you know a baby duck will imprint itself on you. It misses its mother. — Michael Leunig

Muftis and bishops should be like ripe camembert cheeses - a bit on the nose and not for the faint-hearted, but memorable! — Michael Leunig

Who can protest alone? Who dares rise up? It is not easy. One is all alone, and evermore shall be so. — Michael Leunig

We might imagine that Jesus had many human faults. He failed most humanly, in my reckoning, when he killed the fig tree just because it didn't bear any figs for his breakfast; that was a disgraceful, bad-tempered thing to do, and to try and make a virtue of it by saying it was a demonstration of faith only made things worse. — Michael Leunig

Stay out of the loop, the club, the inner circle. — Michael Leunig

I'm totally deaf in my right ear, yeah. — Michael Leunig

When I was a boy, my own dad told me in a smiling and wistful way that it's a wise man that knows his own father. — Michael Leunig

Sweetheart,' 'darling,' 'luv.' I like these words; they fit me like a comfortable old pullover. I remember them from childhood; that's what innocent little boys were called by cheerful aunties back then, to make them feel welcome and secure in the world. — Michael Leunig

The insatiable need for heartless power and ruthless control is the telltale sign of an uninitiated man - the most irresponsible, incompetent and destructive force on earth. — Michael Leunig

The repression of virtuous instinct in the modern world is an incremental tragedy. Repress one instinct, and you repress many; other parts of consciousness go down, also. — Michael Leunig

I was a reflective child. — Michael Leunig

Modern man is probably a more humiliated and depressed creature than he dares to know. — Michael Leunig

It is home schooling that is rejecting a narrowness. It is not a radical value system; it's actually quite conservative. — Michael Leunig

Happiness is just a little thing;
Humans mostly are too large for it.
If you cannot feel the joy of spring
Shrink yourself and maybe then you'll fit. — Michael Leunig

Integrity is an ecosystem. — Michael Leunig

Emotional stability has not been America's gift to the world. — Michael Leunig

What modern humans need help with is escaping from the despair of politics, commerce and media, escaping from the drabness and oppressiveness of worldly values and seeing through suburban mentality and normal community standards so that they can find some much-needed relief for their wilting souls. — Michael Leunig

People seem to take as much offence as they possibly can these days - it's almost a new type of greed, a new kind of road rage. — Michael Leunig

A society that's provided for by television is a society that says it doesn't need too many parks or natural situations for children to play in because television will look after them. — Michael Leunig

Making jokes is about the most wrong and stupid thing a bemused, middle-aged, white heterosexual Anglo Saxon sort of Celt Australian male can do these days. — Michael Leunig

I had a few ducks as a kid. — Michael Leunig

Each day is a lifetime. — Michael Leunig

Out of economic hardship can come change - we are suddenly cast onto our wits and our talents and our resources and our strengths, as we lose all the choices we once had. — Michael Leunig

Existential philosophy, poetry and art - just like sadness - were all unavoidable to a tender young man in the meat works. — Michael Leunig

Clever modern man is so witless that he thinks moral silence and empty conscience are an advantage. — Michael Leunig

I see a lot of my children. They're around the house all the time on the farm, you know. — Michael Leunig

The relentless invisible storm of radio signals and electronic particles, the hustle and bustle, and the billions of petrol explosions in the engine blocks of trucks and cars seem to churn up the molecules of life and heaven so violently that the beautiful fogs are unable to hold together like they once did. — Michael Leunig

In my adolescence, I think I felt very outcast; I felt lonely. I felt great loneliness, and sometimes I wouldn't partake in Christmas, and I would go off and wander in the streets of Melbourne. — Michael Leunig

Life seems sadly mishandled by humans, as if it's all too much for them - they spend so much time and energy hurting each other, making things worse, and fouling their own nest, all because they imagine things aren't good enough and should be made much better. — Michael Leunig

What a magical thing is the bed, and what a vulnerable, innocent creature is the sleeping human - the human who never looks more truthful or pitiful or benign; the curled-up, childlike dreaming soul who has for a few hours become an angel adrift. — Michael Leunig

In the modern world, it may be that a living father can only be half a father to a boy - the dead father is the other vital half: the half that grows the boy up once and for all. — Michael Leunig

In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists. — Michael Leunig

It is known that wildfires behave unpredictably - this is fundamental - but it is my experience that humans in the presence of wildfire are also likely to behave in aberrant and unpredictable ways. — Michael Leunig

As a child, I heard many warnings from teachers about the perils of talking with strangers. Yet now, fairly late in my life, I can think of not many things better than to talk with strangers. The idea of being a stranger is also very appealing. — Michael Leunig

The creative act is also in a small way a suffering act - we start out with our ego, this hope of making this thing whatever it be, but so often it eludes us and it collapses and we kind of regress into this mental suffering, we can't find what we're looking for. — Michael Leunig

I think melancholy is part of the natural condition, you know. Anyway, I think it's the artist's function to have their melancholy and not hide it, you see. — Michael Leunig

It is difficult to imagine any time in history when so many people claiming to be so free have lived in so much fear of being unattractive. — Michael Leunig

Don't give in to hate - it puts you off balance — Michael Leunig

I have always loved contemporary dance, but it has always been a bit of a mystery to me. But choreography is very much like what I do when you are putting characters in frame on the page. It's so impressive what they do with their bodies. It's like painting: an abstraction. — Michael Leunig

There was all this loneliness in my cartoons and people would say, "Gee, these characters are so lonely, disconnected, depressed." And I'd say, 'Yeah well, that's not me. I'm just interested in that because I think it makes a funny drawing.' But later I understood it was me in many respects; my hand was doing it ahead of the head's understanding. — Michael Leunig

In contemporary art culture, where good looks and clever strategic planning of art careers have become a feature, professional practice may be taught in art schools like a branch of public relations or political science. — Michael Leunig

It's terrible the way words get attached to you like barnacles. — Michael Leunig

At last, after completing year 12, I failed the great final examination, repeated the following year and failed again even more dismally than before. This was not an easy thing to do. My mates did the simple thing in the first place and mainly passed with honours and went on to have remarkably successful lives. — Michael Leunig

I give thanks for the fact that I can get this stick with a bit of steel nib on the end, dip it in some black carbon stuff, and draw on paper. Now, people did it the same way 2,000 years ago. And there's something lovely about that play, and making mud pies and a mess. That's a lovely privilege. — Michael Leunig

Have I got the right to experiment with my child's life? — Michael Leunig

The expressive body is not literal; it's very primal, and that's what I feel when I make the best of my work. It's coming from a primal place rather than an intellectual place. — Michael Leunig

As we grow, we lift our gaze higher and higher, and then sometimes we are brought to our knees, but all is not lost; what we find on the ground can be very valuable and precisely what we need. — Michael Leunig