DAVID LANGE

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.

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.

One minute I was a clapped-out, two-guinea, legal-aid lawyer, and the next minute I was in parliament.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

...an economic ignoramus unfit to oversee a fifty-cent raffle.

Our military forces are an arm of government, just like the Department of Social Welfare, although probably less able to inflict widespread harm

Politics is irrational. Politics is about human beings with their frailties and perversions and distortions or perception, who prioritise things according to their conviction.

I didn't go into Parliament to be fair to my opponents. Quite honestly I went in to jump on their windpipes!”

My opponent has all the intellectual rigor of an amoeba.

He had more on his mind than his mind could hold.

The statesmen of the world who boast and threaten that they have Doomsday weapons are far more dangerous, and far more estranged from “reality”, than many of the people on whom the label “psychotic” is affixed.

An itinerant masseur, massaging the politically erogenous zones

He's gone around the country stirring up apathy.

I wouldn't call the Prime Minister gutless. That's all that's left of him.

I think more than anything, that's when I decided politics was on.

New Zealand’s nuclear free movement is a broad-based and popular movement. Our nuclear free status is a challenge to much that is accepted as orthodox in international relations. It was formally adopted in the cold war era as a form of resistance to the dismal doctrines of nuclear deterrence. It is still a rebuke to the unprincipled exercise of economic power and military might.

Will the United States pull the rug on New Zealand? The answer is no. They might polish the lino a bit harder and hope that I execute a rather unseemly glide across it.

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.

Today's Schools are not Tomorrows Schools. That's a fundamental misconception.

Our nuclear free status is a statement of our belief that we and our fellow human beings can build the institutions which will one day allow us all to renounce the weapons of mass destruction. We are a small country and what we can do is limited. But in this as in every other great issue, we have to start somewhere.

Our nuclear free status means that we decline to acquiesce in the strategies of nuclear deterrence. We will not turn a blind eye to them, and pretend that the weapons are no longer a threat. We will not in any way tolerate the testing of nuclear weapons, or their manufacture, or their deployment.