George Galloway

"Are you an Israeli? I don't debate with Israelis. I have been misled, sorry I don't recognise Israel and I don't debate with Israelis"

"I don’t begrudge the Labour members here their moment of celebration of course [...] But there will be others who are already celebrating: the venal, the vile, the racists and the Zionists will all be celebrating. The hyena can bounce on the lion’s grave but it can never be a lion and in any case, I’m not in my grave. As a matter of fact I’m going off now to plan the next campaign."

"Hamas won the only democratic election ever held in the Arab world so how they can be tyrants I really don't know [...] I am not in favour of Hamas but I am in favour of democracy."

"It might be really sordid and bad sexual etiquette, but whatever else it is, it is not rape or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning."

"We did not suspend our democracy in our darkest hours why are we suspending it now? the fawning over Thatcher had gone too far... This put the tin hat on it the idea that we should suspend a vital part of our democratic process for a party political and private funeral, Mr Churchill didn’t ask for Parliament to be silenced, for confrontations across the House to be forbidden. When our soldiers were being laid waste in the Norway debate, the House of Commons perhaps rose to its finest 20th Century moment. Nobody said: "Our armed forces have suffered a disaster, the House of Commons cannot meet, the clash of ideas cannot be heard, we must muffle the drums and silence ourselves.""

"It was al Qaeda who used the chemical weapons. Who gave al Qaeda the chemical weapons? Here's my theory: Israel gave them the chemical weapons."

"Well, I don’t agree that it’s genocide, but I definitely agree that there’s suffering going on there."

"The roots of this problem definitely are in the fact that not enough groups, trends, parties or individual personalities came into Respect [...] Therefore the perception was created that it was an organisation dominated by the SWP, who have form, or dominated by me, or, later, dominated by Muslims."

"Let me tell you, I think that Julian Assange's personal sexual behaviour is something sordid, disgusting, and I condemn it. But ... Even taken at its worst, if the allegations made by these two women were true, 100 per cent true, and even if a camera in the room captured them, they don’t constitute rape. At least not rape as anyone with any sense can possibly recognise it."

"[One of the women] Claims that she woke up to him having sex with her again. This is something which can happen, you know. I mean not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion."

"I refused this evening at Oxford University to debate with an Israeli, a supporter of the apartheid state of Israel. The reason is simple: no recognition, no normalisation. Just boycott, divestment and sanctions, until the apartheid state is defeated. I never debate with Israelis nor speak to their media. If they want to speak about Palestine – the address is the PLO."

"Thatcher described Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist". I was there. I saw her lips move. May she burn in the hellfires...Tramp the dirt down."

"I am in the House of Commons every day; I just do not want to vote for Tweedledum or Tweedledee"

"It's not just people with a percentage of the vote who have the right to speak. All of us have the right to speak. What happened to Farage looked ugly in the rest of the country and the rest of the world. And the SNP I fear will take you down a road where grudge is everything."

"What a silly question! What a silly person you are! Hezbollah is winning the war; you can see on the other half of the screen. Hezbollah is more popular today in Lebanon amongst Christians, amongst Sunnis, amongst Shiite, amongst all Arabs, amongst all Muslims that it has ever been. It’s Israel who’s lost the war, and Bush and Blair for politically organizing the war, who’ve lost politically. This is a defeat of Bush and Blair and Israel. Everybody but you can see it!"

"You don’t give a damn! You don’t give a damn, you don’t even know about the Palestinian families! You don’t even know that they exist! Tell me the name of one member of the seven members of the same family slaughtered on the beach in Gaza by an Israeli warship. You don’t even know their names! But you know the name of every Israeli soldier who has been taken prisoner in this conflict. Because you believe whether you know it or not that Israeli blood is more valuable than the blood of Lebanese or Palestinians. That’s the truth, and the discerning of your viewers already know it."

"These extremist Islamists locked me in a room and threatened to hang me because we are the democratic alternative to them. We say to young Muslims: we know that you’re angry, you’re right to be angry. But the best way to be angry is to hit the government where it hurts, through politics, through the ballot box, through elections, through engaging with non-Muslims to build a broad front to bring about a change in policies at home and abroad."

"Christianity doesn't come into it. George Bush and Tony Blair are not Christians. Religious people believe in the prophets, peace be upon them. Bush believes in the profits and how to get a piece of them. So don't ever confuse this with a war of civilizations."

"Because I don't believe that the government of Iran is a dictatorship I have no problem about working for Press TV in London which is a British owned television station. I'm not responsible for the government of Ahmedinijad. I'm not responsible for the leadership of Press TV."

"I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns. I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war, and on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defense made of his."

"I am speaking for tens of millions, and maybe more, around the world, who know the truth about Iraq. Who know that the real criminals are in Washington. Not in the United Nations. The real criminals are in the White House, not in the Elysee Palace. The real criminals are in the Congress, not in the anti-war movement."

"Bush, and Blair, and the prime minister of Japan, and Berlusconi, these people are criminals, and they are responsible for mass murder in the world, for the war, and for the occupation, through their support for Israel, and through their support for a globalized capitalist economic system, which is the biggest killer the world has ever known. It has killed far more people than Adolf Hitler."

"I can't mention, I'm sorry to say, any Arab leader... Where is the... Nasser? Where is the Arab leader who will stand up and tell these people the truth? This is what we are waiting for."

"We want to make reparation to the Palestinian people for the crimes of Balfour which were committed in the building behind me, when one person, on behalf of one country, promised a second people the lands of a third people - the Palestinians."

"We are determined that we should stop the privatization of basic services of the British people. We are determined to defend the liberty of the British people which is being taken away day by day under the name of anti-terrorism. Ancient freedoms, which we had for hundreds of years, are being taken away from us under the name of the war on terror, when the real big terrorists are the governments of Britain and the United States."

"We have worked without rest to remove the causes of such violence from our world. We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings."

"Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will."

"The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters."

"[I]t can be said that the Iraqi resistance is not just defending Iraq. They are defending all the Arabs and they are defending all the people of the world from American hegemony."

"Some believe that those aeroplanes on September 11 came out of a clear blue sky. I believe they came out of a swamp of hatred created by us. I believe that because the total, complete unending and bottomless support for General Sharon’s crimes against the Palestinian people."

"You know, Mr Hitchens, you are a court jester - not in Camelot like other miserable liberals before you, but in the court of the Bourbon Bushes. You start off being the liberal mouthpiece for one of the most reactionary governments this country has ever known and you end up a mouthpiece and apologist for these miserable malevolent incompetents who cannot even pick up the bodies of their own citizens in New Orleans."

"People like Mr Hitchens are willing to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood...How I wish he would put on a tin hat and pick up a gun and go and fight himself."

"Mr Hitchens's policy has succeeded in making 10,000 new Bin Ladens."

"What you have witnessed [since Christopher Hitchens’s opposition to the 1991 invasion of Iraq] is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly into a slug."

"I think we have generated as much light as we are going to...And as much heat as we ought to."

"All dignified people in the world, whether Arabs or Muslims or others with dignity, are very proud of the speech made by president Bashar al-Assad a few days ago here in Damascus."

"For me he is the last Arab ruler, and Syria is the last Arab country. It is the fortress of the remaining dignity of the Arabs, and that's why I'm proud to be here."

"Syria is being threatened - because she will not betray the Palestinian resistance, because she will not betray the Lebanese resistance, Hizbullah, because she will not sign a shameful surrender-peace with General Sharon, and above all - more than any of these others - because Syria will not allow her country to be used as a military base for America to crush the resistance in Iraq."

"So I say to you, citizens of the last Arab country, this is a time for courage, for unity, for wisdom, for determination, to face these enemies with the dignity your president has shown, and I believe, God willing, we will prevail and triumph, wa-salam aleikum."

"This murder of Hariri was deliberately planned and executed precisely to implicate Syria and to set in train the events which have unfolded."

"Now, would you like me to be the cat?"

"Pipe down Mr Indignation. We'll see what the viewers thought of your double standards, your indignation about me and the aplomb with which you become a lying plutocrat in your gentleman's club."

"I had three goals and all of them were met."

"Only a fool has no regrets and I'm not a fool."

"As for Gordon Brown - I've described him and Blair as two cheeks of the same arse."

"[Q:] Would the assassination of, say, Tony Blair by a suicide bomber - if there were no other casualties - be justified as revenge for the war on Iraq? [...] [A:] Yes, it would be morally justified. I am not calling for it - but if it happened it would be of a wholly different moral order to the events of 7/7. It would be entirely logical and explicable. And morally equivalent to ordering the deaths of thousands of innocent people in Iraq - as Blair did."

"I would not support anyone seeking to assassinate the prime minister. That's why I said in the interview I would report to the authorities any such plot that I knew of. What I did make abundantly clear to Piers Morgan in the GQ interview is that I would like to see Tony Blair in front of a war crimes tribunal for sending this country to war illegally and for the appalling human consequences which resulted. That's what I will continue to press for."

"Israel is invading Lebanon and has killed thirty times more Lebanese civilians than have died in Israel, so it’s you who should be justifying the evident bias which is written on every line on your face, and is in every nuance of your voice, and is loaded in every question that you ask."

"One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. You are totally wrong in saying that in most people’s eyes Hezbollah are terrorists. In most people’s eyes Israel is a terrorist state. It’s the fact that you cannot comprehend that fact that leads to bias that runs through all of your reporting and every question that you’ve asked me in this interview!"

"I've always been a Labour man. I consider myself real Labour. I've never been a Marxist, or a Trotskyist, or any other kind of –ist other than a Labourist. If it weren't for Mr Blair and the Iraq war, I would never have been out of the party in the first place."