“I’m not good enough to be a saint and not bad enough to be interesting.”

I could see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it wasn’t my business.

I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn’t talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.

One American said that the most interesting thing about Holy Ireland was that its people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ. And they do!

Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.

It wasn’t long before people discovered the final horrors of letting an urchin into Parliament.

There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents-if the term is to be used at all.

The Irish aren’t great singers, but they have great songs.

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else

We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.

I think my life will always be worth living, though I don’t imagine it being very easy.

But I make a distinction between the doctrines of the Church, which matter, and the structure invented by half a dozen Italians who got to be pope and which is of very little use to anybody.

Basically, I have no place in organized politics. By coming to the British Parliament, I’ve allowed the people to sacrifice me at the top and let go the more effective job I should be doing at the bottom.

It did not seem to me that prejudice, poverty, discrimination, repression and racism were confined to the North of Ireland.

I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.

Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody’s lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

My function in life is not to be a politician in Parliament: it is to get something done.

Life is a struggle, but not a warfare.

Football players, the brain and all that stuff, ooh-eee, that’s not good.

Not even always preaching but just leading, motivating them by being a leader.

Yet you should not marvel if I do not enter that city so quickly.

Life is a series of commas, not periods.

Don’t say you can do something when you really can’t.

You can kill the body but not the spirit.

The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money.