Top 66 Michael Leunig Quotes

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

There is some suffering that awaits us all.

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.

The work of the artist is to express what is repressed or even to speak the unspoken grief of society.

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.

On Anzac Day, coffee and jokes with a Turk might be the most meaningful and fair dinkum dawn service you could possibly have.

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.

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.’

Art, it seems to me, doesn’t need freedom so much as it needs courage and love – some would call it ‘soul’ or ‘Eros.’

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

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

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.

Of all the seasons, winter is the most conducive to the great art of dormancy. This art requires an appreciation of semi-consciousness: the beautiful and necessary prelude to sleep – a special pleasure in itself that is all too often neglected, under-valued or looked down upon.

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.

Fogs are like dreams that feed the soul, and without their mysterious embrace, childhood, courtship, poetry and the composition of music become all the more difficult.

The world is philosophically booby-trapped; touch an interesting subject, and it just might blow up in your face. Some say it’s better not to touch.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The human relationship to combustion is as mysterious as it is fraught with madness. From the candle flame to the nuclear blast, it has lit up the human imagination with fear and fascination.

Anzac Day, it seems, must now be done with bluster, hoopla and media hypnotism.

The scariness of manhood to males may be symbolically seen in the many stories of indigenous Australian boys who ran away and hid in the bush as the time of initiation approached.

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

I never really understood who the Magi were as a child. What is a Magi? Not a word I would use, but a magpie I could understand.

It is home schooling that is rejecting a narrowness. It is not a radical value system; it’s actually quite conservative.

Meat workers may have been looked down upon socially, but at least they were well-paid and were a fit and lively bunch as a result of hard, honest physical work.

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.

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.

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.

In some ways, calm bodily protest has a nakedness to it that may be deeply embarrassing for observers; an act not unlike the bare-faced Oliver Twist effrontery that stands vulnerably before authority, asking for more or better.

To live in the midst of suffering, which we do, we do, amid distress, and to keep some equilibrium in the midst of that – that would be happiness enough.

A world view is probably an expression of self.

I had a few ducks as a kid.

Many people first encounter Jesus during childhood when they are suddenly confronted by a horrifying statue of a man nailed to a cross, and this is often a most unfortunate and repulsive beginning.

Humanity hungers for the uncommon.

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.

If you’re becoming weary and disillusioned with Australian values, Judeo-Christian values or Western civilisation, I recommend strangers – they’re such a glorious, redeeming wilderness to wander into.

Wisdom may best arise from a humbling reality.

As a child, I dreamed that my bed could fly and glide and swoop and hover high over the countryside near my home while, snug and secure, I looked down in wonder at the great carpet of life that seemed so perfect beneath me.

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.

I had many good teachers, but only three of them were school teachers.

You wouldn’t wish hardship on anyone, but when it comes, you would be crazy not to see the huge growth that will come from it.

I became a cartoonist because I’d sort of failed at everything else, really. I mean, it was by default.

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.

There are times when the art world seems like a religious empire. There are great cathedral galleries and pilgrimage sites where treasured art pieces are displayed like holy relics, and this can certainly be a great pleasure on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

I’m totally deaf in my right ear, yeah.

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.

Every child is a greedy child, I think. I mean, it’s healthy to be a greedy child.

Sometimes a witticism has no truth behind it.

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.

In nicey-nicey land, you must be happy-clappy and positive all the time – bad news is taboo.

A beautiful wake-up is one of life’s most perfectly happy times.

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

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

I am probably not alone in sensing above me the huge corporations and monstrous banks, science, politics and technologies, spy satellites and stock markets, military systems and massive wealth – forces and dynamics I don’t understand or can hardly imagine.

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.

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.

Practically every technology that is ever invented is touted as being the new savior, the thing that will bring peace and goodwill to the earth, but immediately it falls into other hands who see it as the opportunity to promote the very opposite.