David Lange
David Lange
David Russell Lange ONZ CHserved as the 32nd Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1984 to 1989. He headed New Zealand's fourth Labour Government, one of the most reforming administrations in his country's history, but one which did not always conform to traditional expectations of a social-democrat party. He had a reputation for cutting witand eloquence. His government implemented far-reaching free-market reforms. Helen Clark described New Zealand's nuclear-free legislation as his legacy...
NationalityNew Zealander
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth4 August 1942
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I think people really have a much better understanding of the cost of capital and clearly with debt as cheap as it is, it doesn't make a lot of sense to have a balance sheet with excess cash,
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Money motivates. The goals (in the public sector) are more about service than money,
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We knew that to reach young guys we had to use humor, so the 'news expose' creative concept fit with our objective. Having the resources and experience allowed us to create compelling entertainment that speaks right to AXE Shower's target.
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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.
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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.
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I, as prime minister, never went to Washington. Certainly never went to a presidential ranch. I hate to say this, but I wasn't going to be the pilot fish to the shark, whereas Australia quite happily bobbed along like a happy little pilot fish with a shark who was a messy eater, and I just couldn't feel like that.
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George W. Bush: a person who is the ultimate outcome of the American condition. Someone promoted above ability because of circumstance and organisation and empathy. You don't have to be intelligent. A moron in a hurry could know that you don't prevent war by having a war.
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It's a funny thing when you think you're dead. You're not terrified of it anymore. There's a sort of a epiphany to religious thing; it's not sort of church-based, but you end up with a serenity which you didn't have before, and I just simply enjoy it. It really does sound stupid, but I've got to tell you it's made my life.
One minute I was a clapped-out, two-guinea, legal-aid lawyer, and the next minute I was in parliament.
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We do not wish to have nuclear weapons on New Zealand soil or in our harbors. We do not ask, we do not expect, the United States to come to New Zealand's assistance with nuclear weapons or to present American nuclear capability as a deterrent to an attacker.
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This is the difficulty about talking about it without sounding big-headed, but you cannot speak of New Zealand now without my involvement in what it has become.
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They can fish for catfish for all I care, as long as they fill up our hotels.
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We cannot by ourselves reduce the number of nuclear weapons in the world, but we are doing what has to be done all over the world if those weapons are one day to be eliminated. We will not contemplate any circumstance in which their possession or threatened use is justified. We reject the secrecy and hypocrisy which surrounds the continuing refinement of the technology.
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I think more than anything, that's when I decided politics was on.