Bill Shorten Quotes

#1. Labor must work harder to attract and retain members. The party should be cheaper to join with discounted rates available for union members as well as for students, pensioners, and people out of work.

Bill Shorten

#2. Labor is at its best when we are the party of ideas and action - ideas that empower the powerless and actions that build a better Australia for the long term.

Bill Shorten

#3. My preference is that employees pay their union dues, but what I also get is that I'd rather someone be in the union than not in the union.

Bill Shorten

#4. One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen's claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#5. If I am elected leader, my shadow opposition team will actively incorporate the policy contributions of all our members by instituting policy action committees as recommend by the 2010 National Review.

Bill Shorten

#6. Invisible, repetitive, exhausting, unproductive, uncreative - these are the adjectives which most perfectly capture the nature of housework.

Angela Davis

#7. I've seen enough successful writers who no longer seem to care when they are recognized with an award, and I think that's just tragic.

Louise Penny

#8. To the best of my knowledge, when I became national secretary and, indeed, Victorian secretary, the - my predecessors in the union had detected wrong activities, activities which aren't in the best traditions of the AWU or, indeed, trade unionism.

Bill Shorten

#9. I would never want the show to be a Democrat show or Republican show, because for us the show's more important than that. It isn't for everybody else in the world, but it is for us.

Matt Stone

#10. In the far upper corner of my altar is a photo of Joan Crawford in her most fierce Mommy Dearest mode, just to remind me of some of the cost of everyone's hard-earned sweetness and light.

Alice Walker

#11. I think it is a cornerstone of our electoral system that you raise electoral funds for elections but that doesn't mean that therefore the implication can be made that the recipients are incapable of transacting their interests and their duties towards people any differently.

Bill Shorten

#12. Once upon a time, I thought denial was a river in Egypt. It's actually the attitude of the Abbott government.

Bill Shorten

#13. I'm a Christian and a supporter of marriage equality under the law.

Bill Shorten

#14. When you get wisdom, failure and discouragement will get behind you.

Sunday Adelaja

#15. The world is changing from day to day; it is high time for our writers to take off their masks, look frankly, keenly, and boldly at life, and write about real flesh and blood. It is high time for a brand-new arena for literature, high time for some bold fighters to charge headlong into battle!

Lu Xun

#16. Failure doesn't come from falling down, failure comes from not getting up

Zig Ziglar

#17. I can't wait to start something up myself that is actually about giving unsigned bands the exposure they deserve, especially when they travel so far to play the smallest gig they've ever played in their lives.

Dan Hawkins

#18. When I entered federal parliament at the end of 2007, I was appointed parliamentary secretary for disabilities.

Bill Shorten

#19. Productivity is driven at the enterprise level. Better wages, better performing workplaces, are driven at the workplace level.

Bill Shorten

#20. Black people have slavery. And white people have our own thing-stuff we went though that hurt us that we have to cope with. Like when they took our slaves away. That was really hard for us. So it's pretty even.

Louis C.K.

#21. Labor should not be about creating monuments on hills or statues in parks. Labor's monuments and statues are when a young person can find a job, when a person with disability can get access to the ordinary life that others take for granted.

Bill Shorten

#22. What I've done as a union leader and what literally thousands of other union representatives do, is make sure that we have co-operation in the workplace. What I get is that where employees are well treated, employers do well.

Bill Shorten

#23. I've spent my whole working life standing up for workers. Didn't matter if it was the two trapped miners at Beaconsfield or professional netballers or indeed factory workers or construction workers.

Bill Shorten

#24. I want to build a Big Labor party. A party of big ideas. A party which is deeply connected to the community. A party which reflects our diverse nation.

Bill Shorten

#25. Trusting people to pursue their own futures invariably provides better outcomes. Money goes where it is needed, rather than being absorbed by administration costs.

Bill Shorten

#26. Hemingway is terribly limited. His technique is good for short stories, for people who meet once in a bar very late at night, but do not enter into relations. But not for the novel.

W. H. Auden

#27. OFTEN, THE THING HOLDING us back from success is our inability to say no.

Shane Snow

#28. I'm proud of my record of negotiating agreements, representing people and making sure that both employers and employees could get the best out of going to work every day.

Bill Shorten

#29. What I believe to be every Australian's right - a good, safe job with proper pay and conditions.

Bill Shorten

#30. We commissioned an independent statutory economic body - the Productivity Commission - to review the possibility of funding a disability scheme. The commission returned with a view that it could. Then it becomes an issue of national will.

Bill Shorten

#31. Is that a ziggurat in your pocket or are you just Mesopotamia? You should know I sell happy-to-see-me's & bananas individually or by the pocketful.

Jarod Kintz

#32. I will say that Bernie Sanders are the opposite end of the spectrum from Donald Trump. We see him leading right now in the Republican Party in an intractable way.

Rachel Maddow