If I have learned one thing in life, it is never to take any man's own estimate of himself. He could very well be mistaken.

Separation and devolution are two completely different concepts which cannot be mixed together. One is not a stop on the way to the other.

I love hard political debate and I love beating somebody on a political point but what I'm more frustrated by is the politics where you play the man not the politics.

Scotland cannot be the only 'something for nothing' country in the world.

My Scottish Labour Party is a crusade - to fight poverty, inequality and injustice.

What I will say will not always please you, but what I say will always be honest and true and how I genuinely see it.

Telling the truth, and confronting the challenge, is what politics is about.

We shall seek debate without division or rancour.

My working life has always been wrapped up in doing my job to the best of my abilities and doing the best for my family. It is not a contest between the two.

I got a very strong sense from my mother, in particular, that we are all equal in the sight of God.

Schools are not exam factories for the rat race.

Indeed, no woman should ever be quite accurate about her age. It looks so calculating.

Wisdom often comes from those with the least to lose.

But when she finally did look up, I realized my fatal mistake. That by not leaping for her when she jumped, she thought that I no longer wanted to catch her.

What is actual is actual only for one time. And only for one place.

Money is really only important if you don't have any.

If you don't have a vision you're going to be stuck in what you know. And the only thing you know is what you've already seen.

...most of the time we were alone and mixing up our souls ever more and ever more till it would be terribly hard to say good-by.

Every artist undresses his subject, whether human or still life. It is his business to find essences in surfaces, and what more attractive and challenging surface than the skin around a soul?

I’m a journalist; I run to the fire, that’s what we do.

There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.