Politicians From Scotland

"Remember his mind and no other part of him lived in his new world. He said it gave him an odd sense of detachment to sit in a room among people, and to know that nothing there but himself had any relation at all to the infinite strange world of Space that flowed around them. He would listen, he said, to a great man talking, with one eye on the cat on the rug, thinking to himself how much more the cat knew than the man."

"I gathered from Hollond that he was always conscious of corridors and halls and alleys in Space, shifting, but shifting according to inexorable laws. I never could get quite clear as to what this consciousness was like. When I asked he used to look puzzled and worried and helpless."

"This crowded world of Space was perfectly real to him. How he had got to it I do not know. Perhaps his mind, dwelling constantly on the problem, had unsealed some atrophied cell and restored the old instinct. Anyhow, he was living his daily life with a foot in each world."

"I mused upon the ironic fate which had compelled a mathematical genius to make his sole confidant of a philistine lawyer, and induced that lawyer to repeat it confusedly to an ignoramus at twilight on a Scotch hill."

"I wondered whether the scientific modern brain could not get to the stage of realising that Space is not an empty homogeneous medium, but full of intricate differences, intelligible and real, though not with our common reality."

"I am bound to say that it took me a long time to understand what he meant. He began by saying that everybody thought of Space as an 'empty homogeneous medium.' 'Never mind at present what the ultimate constituents of that medium are. We take it as a finished product, and we think of it as mere extension, something without any quality at all. That is the view of civilised man. You will find all the philosophers taking it for granted. Yes, but every living thing does not take that view."

"How if Space is really full of things we cannot see and as yet do not know? How if all animals and some savages have a cell in their brain or a nerve which responds to the invisible world? How if all Space be full of these landmarks, not material in our sense, but quite real? A dog barks at nothing, a wild beast makes an aimless circuit. Why? Perhaps because Space is made up of corridors and alleys, ways to travel and things to shun? For all we know, to a greater intelligence than ours the top of Mont Blanc may be as crowded as Piccadilly Circus."

"Supposing you knew — not by sight or by instinct, but by sheer intellectual knowledge, as I know the truth of a mathematical proposition — that what we call empty space was full, crammed. Not with lumps of what we call matter like hills and houses, but with things as real — as real to the mind."

"Last night I had looked into the heart of darkness, and the sight had terrified me. What part should I play in the great purification? Most likely that of the Biblical scapegoat."

"It was foreordained that I should go alone to Umvelos', and in the promptings of my own infallible heart I believed I saw the workings of Omnipotence. Such is our moral arrogance, and yet without such a belief I think that mankind would have ever been content to bide sluggishly at home."

"I believe that every man has in his soul a passion for treasure-hunting, which will often drive a coward into prodigies of valour."

"Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future."

"The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda's Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers."

"Perfect love casteth out fear, the Bible says; but, to speak it reverently, so does perfect hate."

"I mind as if it were yesterday my first sight of the man. Little I knew at the time how big the moment was with destiny, or how often that face seen in the fitful moonlight would haunt my sleep and disturb my waking hours."

"Time, they say, must the best of us capture, And travel and battle and gems and gold No more can kindle the ancient rapture, For even the youngest of hearts grows old."

"What do we mean by spiritual development? Surely, the broadening and deepening of the mind till it regards the world in its true perspective, and the strengthening of the character so that the will is a tempered and unerring weapon in the charge of a man's soul. And this end is to be achieved only by the exercise of the mind upon the largest possible manifold of experience, and by the conflict of character with the alien forces of the world."

"Wise men never grow up; indeed, they grow younger, for they lose the appalling worldly wisdom of youth."

"It was a very young man's confession of faith, and yet there was the glimmering of a truth at the back of it. It was my instinctive protest against the undue simplification of life. We are all a strange compound, and we shall never reach our full stature by starving certain parts of our nature of their due."

"It was a very happy time, but like all happy times it had no landmarks."

"Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead."

"It is only a dying cause which can attain to perfect taste."

"In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility."

"The secret of life is to find out what one really wants."

"Happiness lies only in a divine unrest; and if you are lapped in comfort you stagnate and miss it."

"The Simple Life is the last refuge of complicated and restless souls."

"We can pay our debts to the past by putting the future in debt to ourselves."

"The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there."

"The robe of flesh wears thin, and with the years God shines through all things."

"As the father of five mixed-race children I treat #Humza's accusation that I'm a racist with contempt."

"And it's beyond alarming that last night, the Rochdale by-election returned a candidate that dismisses the horror of what happened on October 7, who glorifies Hezbollah and is endorsed by Nick Griffin, the racist former leader of the BNP."

"There is nobody in the current parliament who can speak as well as Galloway. He will make a number of flamboyant interventions which will transfix the media and be most unpleasant for the Labour leader. The BBC will give him a regular platform. The Palestinian cause will have a leader with real profile and one many British Jews loathe."

"Galloway filed a High Court action in Dublin against Twitter in May for defamation as the social media platform labelled his account "Russian state-affiliated media." He denies the label as he no longer presents his show on any Russian-linked channel. He said the "unjust” link by Twitter is "a daily stab to the heart of who I am and what I am.""

"[Galloway] has fought even more seats than he's had wives."

"Galloway says he abhors antisemitism, which makes it rotten luck that one of his aides was exposed as a Holocaust denier. Hard to imagine what might have drawn such a person to an avowed anti-racist, but there we are. When the Galloway travelling circus comes to town, it always brings the same trouble, pitting communities against each other, stirring up fear and loathing."

"The blame for the poisonous campaign should be laid at the feet of George Galloway. It is very good news the veteran rabble rouser lost his seventh contest in a row ..."

"I've always admired George's anti-imperialist stances and I don't regret, for a second, standing side by side on those issues. But for me, to have to make a choice between that and standing up for the rights of women was a false choice. I thought it was a blurring of something that didn't need to be blurred. It's not that complicated – you can hold two ideas at the same time."

"Today's not the day I'm going to be polite to anti-Semite scum – to be explicit George Galloway."

"George Galloway and Steve Bannon were speaking on the same panel in Almaty. This photo appears to suggest warmth and fellow feeling between the two men. If so, it is one of the most disturbing images of our troubled times."

"[T]he metropolitan media so loathe Galloway that – with the exception of the Guardian – they failed even to report the growing tide of support for Respect during the campaign and have been largely unable to make sense of it since, dismissing the result as a one-off based on Galloway's larger than life personality and ability to "play the Muslim card"."

"[A] well-known former parliamentarian from the main centre-left party has used a charismatic radical left populism to mobilise alienated voters at the sharp end of austerity against a political elite that has failed to deliver for them for decades."

"No doubt George and I will come across each other somewhere . . . I thought the tactics he used against our candidate [Naz Shah, the Labour candidate who regained Bradford West the previous May] were appalling. I was quite shocked; it was appalling."

"And indeed in Bradford some of his appeal to the voters was couched in sectional and religious language unprecedented in the past 60 years of British politics. One of his leaflets began thus: "God KNOWS who is a Muslim. And he KNOWS who is not. Instinctively, so do you. Let me point out to all the Muslim brothers and sisters what I stand for."... I should just add that almost no Galloway event or pronouncement is now complete without several invocations of "Allah" in one form or another."

"Galloway has many of the ingredients that might have taken him to the top: brains, good looks, courage, a compelling style. What he lacks is fatal: judgment."

"Throughout last week the High Court [during Galloway's libel suit against The Telegraph] witnessed George Galloway's soul laid bare: the pungent rhetoric, the radical politics forged in a Celtic furnace, the defensive posture of a particularly spiky porcupine. There are some dimensions of the MP for Glasgow, Kelvin which are predictable in an iconoclast of the old left; but others which are uniquely his own."

"Galloway should recognise his error in arguing that every sovereign government must be free "to make its own mistakes". No. Not when those mistakes include genocide. Absolutely not."

"[F]resh from his senate triumph, and dressed in his natty beige suit, Galloway always looked the winner. You'll rarely meet a more skilled politician...I was vaguely surprised that Hitchens even landed some punches."

"Galloway’s preferred style is that of vulgar ad hominem insult, usually uttered while a rather gaunt crew of minders stands around him. I have a thick skin and a broad back and no bodyguards. He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a "popinjay" (true enough, since its original Webster’s definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest)."

"But he looks so much like what he is: a thug and a demagogue, the type of working-class-wideboy-and-proud-of-it who is too used to the expenses account, the cars and the hotels - all cigars and back-slapping. He is a very cheap character and a short-arse like a lot of them are, puffed up like a turkey."

"My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Kelvin made his familiar views known in his inimitable way. Some of the good points that he made on the middle east peace process would, I believe, carry more credibility if he had not made a career of being not just an apologist, but a mouthpiece, for the Iraqi regime over many years."