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

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.

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.

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

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

It is not easy to stop thinking ill of others.Usually one must enter into a friendship with a person who has accomplished that great feat himself.Then something might start to rub off on you of that true elegance.

I’ve never had a sense of entitlement. I saw how hard my father worked for his money, and it was always made very clear to me that things wouldn’t just be given to me.

Those ills are easiest to bear with which we are most familiar.

Nothing in the world is easier in the United States than to accuse a black man of crime.

I feel like every time I write a song, it feels like the first time I wrote a song. It’s just as hard. It doesn’t get easier, but that’s why I love it: because it’s a challenge every time.

Some people turn sad awfully young. No special reason, it seems, but they seem almost to be born that way. They bruise easier, tire faster, cry quicker, remember longer and, as I say, get sadder younger than anyone else in the world. I know, for I’m one of them.

The hardest part of leaving is to make it look so easy… isn’t that the unfortunate fuckin truth.

You know, there has never been a 24-hour period in five years when I have not responded to e-mail at Facebook. I am not saying it’s easy. I work long hours.