A speechwriter’s departing words

The speechwriter to Victoria, Australia premier John Brumby is leaving for greener pastures, and he writes a long farewell that concludes with these wise lines:

Governments—unlike the timeless eternity of the public service—have limited life spans and need to behave accordingly: agitating for progress, focusing on defining issues and moments, and realising that, although politics may be, as Bismarck said, the art of the possible, that does not mean, as Havel pointed out, that we should stop striving for the impossible.