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)
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