To gain what is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else.

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

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.

Irish Catholics are more interested in the rosary beads than in the rosary...

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.

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

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

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

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

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