He said a lot of other things too. But that portion of the address stands out today, given the upcoming referendum to consider enshrining an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice in the Constitution.
"The message should be that there is nothing to fear or to lose in the recognition of historical truth, or the extension of social justice, or the deepening of Australian social democracy to include Indigenous Australians," he said.
"There is everything to gain ... and if we have a sense of justice, as well as common sense, we will forge a new partnership."
Mr Keating's address, delivered at Redfern in Sydney's inner east on December 10, 1992, was the first time an Australian political leader had publicly recognised the death and destruction wreaked on Indigenous culture and society by white settlement.
On the 23rd anniversary of the speech in 2015, Mr Keating revisited his words, telling a Sydney audience Indigenous Australia was pointing the way.
"Is it any wonder then that this culture, the longest with a collective memory of any in continuous existence, with its originality and creativity, is now pointing the way for our own culture," he said.
Then in 2017, the year marking the 25th anniversary of his speech, non-Indigenous Australians heard the Uluru Statement from the Heart laying out Indigenous sovereignty and connection to the land from "time immemorial" and calling for the establishment of a Voice to Parliament protected in the Australian Constitution.
"With substantive constitutional change and structural reform, we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia's nationhood," the statement said.
Professor Megan Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman of the Barrungam nation in southwest Queensland, is one of the key figures behind the history-making Uluru statement.
She says in many ways Mr Keating's Redfern Park speech "was the beginning of the truth-telling process in Australia".
"This speech which is now regarded as the Australian nation's greatest ever speech is as relevant today as they were back then," she told AAP this week.
"It was recognition of the dispossession and the political economy of killings that anchored the imposed state institutions and asymmetrical power relations that exist to this day.
"It was really the first time a PM had held a mirror up to the nation and the impact was acute.
"The fact Keating refers to ATSIC and self-determination and self-management reveals how Australia has regressed on Indigenous rights and the Uluṟu Statement from the Heart provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to correct the course."
The Redfern speech delivered many quotable truth-telling lines that continue to ripple across the fabric of non-Indigenous and Indigenous relations from year to year.
But perhaps those words and those of the Uluru Statement can be threaded together as Australians consider the Voice ahead of the referendum expected in this term of the Labor federal government.
There is commonality, Prof Davis notes, as both invoke "the notion and the action of imagining and imagination".
Prof Davis knows that if changing the law is hard, changing the Constitution is even harder.
"Law reform requires one to imagine the world can change and be a better place. The (Uluru) dialogues exercised their imagination and individuals suspended their concerns that the nation that has let them down, can't change."
As Mr Keating said in 1992, "We cannot imagine that we will fail".
"And this is what the leading 'Yes' campaign, the Uluru Dialogues, has done consistently and persistently for five years to get the nation to this point: We only imagine success. We believe that the Australian people will walk with us. How could it be otherwise?" Prof Davis said.
