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View Full Version : Famous Quotes About New Zealand


dawnrazor
23rd January 2006, 16:14
Right I'll probably get hung for posting this, but what the heck. In case you didn't see the sunday hearld, there was some great quotes about NZ, some not so complimentary, some well known - others less so, but all reasonably funny.

"I believe we were all glad to leave New Zealand. It is not a pleasant place. Amongst the natives there is absent that charming simplicity...and the greater part of the English are the very refuse of society." Charles Darwin 1860.

"If it would not look too much like showing of, I would tell the reader where New Zealand is." Mark Twain 1897

"A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines."
Vladimid Ilyich Lenin 1909

"Altogether too many sheep." George Bernard Shaw 1934

"When I was there it seemed to be shut." Sir Clement Freud 1978

"New Zealand was colonised initially by those Austrailians who had the initiative to escape" Robert Muldoon 1981

"New Zealand is a country of thirty thousand sheep, three million of whom think they are human" Barry Humphries

"There's a real purity in New Zealand that doesn't exist in the States. It's actually not an easy thing to find in the world anymore." Elijah Wood 2003


All I can say about that is Darwin and Lenin must have had a hell of a time here. I read some other place that George Bernard Shaw, was sure he wasn't going to hell when he died as he had already been to rotorua (refering to the thermal areas, rather then the city... although prehaps not)

:laugh:
yungatart
23rd January 2006, 16:19
With reference to Lenin, it would take one to know one...
dawnrazor
23rd January 2006, 16:23
With reference to Lenin, it would take one to know one...

I did think it was a bit rich coming from a bloke from czarist russia, he certainly had nothing to be proud of around then!
Lou Girardin
24th January 2006, 09:38
I did think it was a bit rich coming from a bloke from czarist russia, he certainly had nothing to be proud of around then!

Except that it was a major world power, until the Japs showed them they weren't. It was one of the cultural centres of the world to rival Europe
I'd have thought they had a lot to be proud of.
MSTRS
24th January 2006, 09:51
Except that it was a major world power, until the Japs showed them they weren't. It was one of the cultural centres of the world to rival Europe
I'd have thought they had a lot to be proud of.
Quite right. But Lenin and his cronies....'nuff said. Mind you, Russia did need to crawl out of the 14th century.
Sorry - hijack over.
Lou Girardin
24th January 2006, 11:56
Muldoon did say that NZ immigrants to Aust raised the average IQ in both countries.
Austin Mitchell wrote a book called the "Quarter acre, Pavlova paradise" in which he called us the Prussians of the South Pacific.
Skyryder
25th January 2006, 08:54
Just finished reading Russka by Edward Ruthford.

"A country of inveterate, backwoods, thick-headed, egotistic philistines."
Vladimid Ilyich Lenin 1909

Pretty well sums up the country.

Can't fault the Russian woman though. Met some when on the shuttles. Stunning.

Skyryder
Jackrat
25th January 2006, 17:02
Would the last to leave please turn out the lights.
Buggered if I know who or when.

Give a Maori a nail an the next day he'll be back for your hammer.
From Lion heart in Maori land,by Samuel Marsden.
I belive he was talking about my own ancestors from northland,cheeky shit!!

Kiwi's that imigrate to Australia improve the IQ average of both countrys.
Rob Muldoon,sometime in the 70's.