Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.

A good man giving bad advice is more dangerous than a nasty man giving bad advice.

In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: 'Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.' Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken.

You are not an agnostic.....You are just a fat slob who is too lazy to go to Mass.

Human nature doesn't include all human beings. There are human beings who are indifferent to politics, religion, virtually anything.

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

Nothing does more to activate Christian divisions than talk about Christian unity.

You can safely appeal to the UN in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

The sea which we think of separating the two island actually joins them.

Healing, it turns out, is a journey. It doesn’t happen all at once.

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism.

Originality does not consist in saying what no one has ever said before but in saying exactly what you think yourself.

Absolute space, that is to say, the mark to which it would be necessary to refer the earth to know whether it really moves, has no objective existence.

I don't know how you can move out of one's socioeconomic category if you don't have education.

Baseball is wrong, man with four balls cannot walk

The only way to prevent prostitution altogether would be to imprison one half of the human race.

The human soul finds its saddest imprisonment when it is helpless in the presence of cruelty, when it cannot right a wrong. It finds its highest freedom when it can secure justice to others.

My first Top of the Pops I didn't want to do. I was terrified. I'd never done television before. Seeing the video afterwards was like watching myself die.

I don't see decadence really as what you do, because I don't do much at all that is decadent in my life. But I still am decadent. It's a state of mind, I think.