Accused Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik praised four Australian conservative leaders - including former prime minister John Howard - in his 1,500-page manifesto.

Breivik faced a closed court in Norway overnight accused of carrying out the attacks which police now say killed 76 people - mostly teenagers attending a summer camp - on Friday.

The judge in the case said Breivik - who was arrested after massacring 68 people on the island of Utoya - had admitted the facts of the case but had not pleaded guilty.

In a manifesto posted online under the Anglicised pseudonym Andrew Berwick, the killer quoted Mr Howard, former treasurer Peter Costello, Catholic Cardinal George Pell and conservative writer and historian Keith Windschuttle.

The manifesto includes discussions of European history and Islam as well as instructions on how to buy arms and equipment over the internet and how to plan high-impact terrorist attacks.

Saying Mr Howard had urged Islamic migrants to adopt Australian values, Breivik noted the former prime minister "caused outrage in Australia's Islamic community when he said Muslims needed to speak English and show respect to women".

He praised the Howard government's border protection policies: "They have taken serious steps towards actually enforcing their own borders [and] despite the predictable outcries from various NGOs and anti-racists, prime minister John Howard has repeatedly proven to be one of the most sensible leaders in the Western world."

Breivik also mentioned Mr Costello in the document, saying the former treasurer wanted Islamic immigrants to adopt Australian ways.

"Federal treasurer Peter Costello said Australian Muslim leaders need to stand up and publicly denounce terrorism in all its forms. Mr Costello has also backed calls by prime minister John Howard for Islamic migrants to adopt Australian values," the manifesto says.

At the time of publication Mr Howard had not returned calls from the ABC requesting comment.

In a statement, Mr Costello told ABC News Online that Breivik had "committed a monstrous crime".

"Nothing justifies it and certainly not his deluded rantings about Islam or political correctness. My sympathy goes out to the victims of this despicable act."

Breivik also praised the then Archbishop Pell, who he quoted as saying: "Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for far-reaching renovation is severely limited. I'd also say that Islam is a much more warlike culture than Christianity."

A spokeswoman from Cardinal Pell's office said the Catholic leader was aware of the manifesto but would not be commenting other than to express his sympathy to victims and their families.

She added the cardinal's quotes had been plucked randomly from an article written in 2006.

Breivik wrote that Mr Windschuttle "is tired of that anti-Western slant that permeates academia".

"For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as, at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed," he quoted Mr Windschuttle as saying.

Mr Windschuttle told ABC News Online that it was "the first I've heard of it" but at the time of publication he had not commented further.

Key excerpts

Following are some of the key excerpts from Breivik's manifesto that reference Australian figures.

Quoting Keith Windschuttle:

Australian writer Keith Windschuttle, a former Marxist, is tired of that anti-Western slant that permeates academia: "For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as, at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed. The scientific knowledge that the West has produced is simply one of many ways of knowing. Cultural relativism claims there are no absolute standards for assessing human culture. Hence all cultures should be regarded as equal, though different. The plea for acceptance and open-mindedness does not extend to Western culture itself, whose history is regarded as little more than a crime against the rest of humanity. The West cannot judge other cultures but must condemn its own." He urges us to remember how unique some elements of our culture are: "The concepts of free enquiry and free expression and the right to criticise entrenched beliefs are things we take so much for granted they are almost part of the air we breathe. We need to recognise them as distinctly Western phenomena. They were never produced by Confucian or Hindu culture." But without this concept, the world would not be as it is today. There would have been no Copernicus, Galileo, Newton or Darwin.

Quoting John Howard and Peter Costello:

Federal Treasurer Peter Costello said Australian Muslim leaders need to stand up and publicly denounce terrorism in all its forms. Mr Costello has also backed calls by Prime Minister John Howard for Islamic migrants to adopt Australian values. Mr Howard caused outrage in Australia‘s Islamic community when he said Muslims needed to speak English and show respect to women.

Quoting Cardinal George Pell:

Luckily, not all Christian leaders are appeasers of Islam. One of the intelligent ones comes from Australia, a country that has been fairly resistant to Political Correctness. They have taken serious steps towards actually enforcing their own borders, despite the predictable outcries from various NGOs and anti-racists, and Prime Minister John Howard has repeatedly proven to be one of the most sensible leaders in the Western world. George Cardinal Pell [sic], Archbishop of Sydney, tells of how September 11 was a wake-up call for him personally: "I recognised that I had to know more about Islam." "In my own reading of the Koran, I began to note down invocations to violence. There are so many of them, however, that I abandoned this exercise after 50 or 60 or 70 pages." "The predominant grammatical form in which jihad is used in the Koran carries the sense of fighting or waging war." "Considered strictly on its own terms, Islam is not a tolerant religion and its capacity for fear-reaching renovation [sic] is severely limited." "I'd also say that Islam is a much more war-like culture than Christianity." "I've had it asserted to me is that in the relationship between the Islamic and non-Islamic world, the normal thing is a situation of tension if not war, or outright hostility."

Quoting Cardinal Pell again:

As long as there is separation between religion and state, those of us who don't have any religious belief should prefer religions which tend to create reasonable and prosperous communities. Our traditional Judeo-Christian religions have proven this capability. Islam never has, and probably never will. As Australia's Cardinal George Pell says, "some seculars are so deeply anti-Christian, that anyone opposed to Christianity is seen as their ally. That could be one of the most spectacularly disastrous miscalculations in history." Indeed it could.

Quoting former Liberal Party MP Ross Cameron:

A study from the United States identified the main barriers to men tying the knot. Heading the list was their ability to get sex without marriage more easily than in the past. The second was that they can enjoy the benefits of having a wife by cohabiting rather than marrying. The report lends weight to remarks by Ross Cameron, the parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Family and Community Services, who chided Australian men, blaming Australia‘s looming fertility crisis on men‘s commitment phobia. "The principal reason young women say they don‘t get around to having children is they can‘t find a bloke they like who is willing to commit," he said. "This commitment aversion in the Australian male is a real problem."

Regarding an Australian publishing dispute: