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Quotes 20-Mar-2015 At 7:45:48 PM Imaclawfan

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" LIFE WASN'T MEANT TO BE EASY "

'...Fraser's best known phrase, generally taken as a gloomy explanation of life's difficulties, but for him rather it was a reason to take on difficult tasks...'

By default , Malcolm Frazer took a lot of fun out of life in Australia for many people , when he uttered those infamous words to the Australian public ...

In an interview in 1994 , Frazer gets a ' please explain ' ...

'...that speech is the one that contains, I think, the famous line that will probably haunt you to your grave - 'Life wasn't meant to be easy.' I think you used that in that speech.

I'm not sure whether I did or not. I didn't first say it then. I probably first came nearest to saying it, oh, many years ago in the early 1950s, when somebody was pressing me and saying, 'Why are you standing for parliament, you've got a place in Western Victoria you can live on', and I think then I said something like, 'Well life's not meant to be easy'. But people don't know, not many people are well enough read to know that it's a quotation, and also only part of a quotation. It's the old man in George Bernard Shaw's Methuselah. 'Life' - I'm not sure that I've got it exactly right but - 'Life's not meant to be easy, but take courage child for it can be delightful.' And you know, the Labor Party, when they got hold of it they thought, ah, now we can hang Fraser, and if I had some enemies in the Liberal Party they would have thought, ah we can hang Fraser. But most people - which they did not understand, what so many people did not understand, that you don't con the Australian public - for most of them it is not easy. For many it is damn difficult. And the recognition that whether it's meant to be or not, it is just not easy, but it can also be delightful, was a recognition of a truth.

But you didn't say life isn't easy, you said life wasn't meant to be easy.

Well I know, but people relate that to their own circumstances and they say it's not, well maybe it's not meant to be, and they wouldn't know how they could make it easy for themselves. And so it was, in a sense, uttering a thought and so the more my enemies said it, I thought the more they won me some brownie points instead of lost me some. ...'

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http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-20/malcolm-fraser-dies-after-short-illness/6334620