"[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 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"[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."

"[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"."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 travelled and spent lots of time with people in Greece, many of whom were women—some of whom were known carnally to me. I actually had sexual intercourse with some of the people in Greece. And if the British public and BBC Scotland think that's of interest they are welcome to broadcast it."

"You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever. And you call that justice."

"Why don't you go and take some more drugs, you druggie?"

"Oona King voted to kill a lot of women in the last few years. Many of them had much darker skins than her."

"If I had lost I would have been homeless, I would have had everything I possess taken from me and would have been bankrupted and forced out of public office. In those circumstances I don't feel in any way happy about the award of £150,000."

"The people who invaded and destroyed Iraq and have murdered more than a million Iraqi people by sanctions and war will burn in Hell in the hell-fires, and their name in history will be branded as killers and war criminals for all time. Fallujah is a Guernica, Falluajah is a Stalingrad, and Iraq is in flames as a result of the actions of these criminals."

"How can you have a real election with hundreds of thousands of Crusader soldiers occupying the country, drawing up the electoral law, deciding who is allowed to take part in the elections, and utterly dominating the political life of the country?"

"I'm strongly against abortion. I believe life begins at conception, and therefore unborn babies have rights. I think abortion is immoral."

"[Referring to the The Christian Science Monitor] This newspaper published on its front page in every country in the world that I had taken $10m from Saddam Hussein. That was a grave and serious libel...Of course the documents were a forgery and a newspaper of that importance ought to have made the effort, both morally and legally, to establish the authenticity of those documents before they published them."

"[On David Blunkett] By a mile, it is the most illiberal, vindictive, biliously foaming Home Secretary of modern times. He has done more to destroy the concept of Labour being a party of equality and fairness than any other person... I hope his guide dog savages his ankles."

"The wolves are Bush and Blair, not the soldiers. The soldiers are lions led by donkeys, sent to kill and be killed."

"[On Tony Blair and George W. Bush] They have lied to the British air force and navy when they said the battle of Iraq would be very quick and easy. They attacked Iraq like wolves. They attacked civilians. It is better for Blair and Bush to stop this crime and this catastrophe. It is time for them to return to the UN security council and give diplomacy a chance."

"If you are asking did I support the Soviet Union, yes I did. Yes, I did support the Soviet Union, and I think the disappearance of the Soviet Union is the biggest catastrophe of my life."

"I am on the anti-imperialist left."

"We are being asked to sell the banner which has flown in Scotland with great success, a banner which is showing no sign of becoming unpopular."

"Sir, I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigability, and I want you to know that we are with you, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-nasr, hatta al-Quds until victory, until victory, until Jerusalem."

"The Tories and their friends are laughing all the way to the bank at the disunity in Scotland. We must extend the hand of friendship to the SNP."

"I'm arguing this should not be published, not because of the threats but because of the offence that it has caused to the majority of Muslims. They have a right to expect some genuflection towards what they feel. To publish a paperback would cause an unnecessary distress to a large and significant and vulnerable section of our society."

"All faiths must be prepared to be as rigorously tested as each other and none can expect a special hiding place behind the law."

"Conservative Back Bench Members have an unseemly and shabby desire to rubbish and eventually smash a section of the British work force that has served this country well. ... There are few less pleasant sights than to see well-upholstered, sleek and wealthy Conservative Members insulting a body of men who work hard for a living and who have done so for many centuries."