David Lange Quotes

1942–2005

David Lange (4 August 1942 – 13 August 2005) served as Prime Minister of New Zealand from 1984 to 1989. He headed New Zealand's fourth Labour Government, one of the most reforming administrations in his country's history, alongside Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble.

Also known as: Lange

Random David Lange quote

30 quotes

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

Source: New Zealand Wit & Wisdom (1998)

...a sordid act of international state-backed terrorism.

Death is very, very terminal.

To US Ambassador H. Monroe Browne, who owned a racehorse called Lacka Reason: "You are the only ambassador in the world to race a horse named after your country's foreign policy."

On a trip to Germany, Lange and his entourage were climbing the tower of an ancient castle when they stopped to catch their breath. "How old is this ruin?" someone asked a guide. "Forty-two years," said Lange.

"I went in a round of the Domain on Saturday morning in a rally car. At the start of it, I was asked if I felt scared. I said, 'certainly not, I have been working with Roger for years'."

On Roger Douglas: "He's like rust, he never sleeps."

"a man whose life is so boring that if it flashed past he wouldn't be in 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.

...it all happened so quickly you got a lot of bewilderment; you get a lot of people who are basically meat-and-three-veg quarter-acre New Zealanders who find themselves eating dim sims with chopsticks and they can't cope.

Source: New Zealand Wit & Wisdom (1998)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: David Lange (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.