politicians-from-scotland

"Minnie, I canna caa my wheel, or spin the oo or twine the tweel. It's luve a laddie whammles me. Ech, the wanchancie glamarie."

"Deid sall ye ligg, and ne'er a memorie sall onie hain, or ae regret for ye, sin that ye haena roses o Pierie. In Hades' howff a gangrel ghaist ye'll flee, amang derk ghaists stravaigan sichtlesslie."

"Caller rain frae abune reeshles amang the epple-trees: the leaves are soughan wi the breeze, and sleep faas drappan doun."

"I’m deeply, deeply upset and angry about what’s happened in Gaza, and what continues to happen in Gaza, and the fact that the UK position has been so weak for far too long in respect of this."

"I'm going to be busy getting my hair cut or washing my hair."

"Women do not find it difficult nowadays to behave like men, but they often find it extremely difficult to behave like gentlemen."

"He is a master of a particularly fascinating style, at once smooth and various, which gives the quality of poetry to his explication of ordinary things. He has, moreover, some creative power."

"You are offered a piece of bread and butter that feels like a damp handkerchief – and sometimes, when cucumber is added to it, like a wet one."

"Now there’s ane end of ane old song."

"Loyalty is the Tory’s secret weapon."

"I would also like to take this opportunity to restate that this support for trans rights does not in any way conflict with our work and commitment to protect women from discrimination and advance women’s rights and equality."

"I think I listened to all the arguments when taking forward the Gender Recognition Reform Bill. It was clearly a polarising debate, but fundamentally at the heart of it is making the lives of trans people just that bit better."

"We took all of the factors in the round, around what the case and what the prospects of the case would be, as well as all the other considerations and the impact indeed on the trans community. So, we’ve made that decision for all of the reasons that we have set out. [...] The point here is that Scotland's democratic institution overwhelmingly supported a piece of legislation that is within devolved competence. And because the UK Government and the secretary of state for Scotland didn't like it, he thought he could ride roughshod over the democratic wishes of this parliament."

"I have never said any of the concerns are not truly held. I met with a number of women’s organisations and heard their concerns, but I don’t think there is any evidence to show trying to make the lives of trans people that bit better was going to impact on women and girls. The safety issues come from predatory men."

"All of the evidence tells us that the cause of violence against women and girls is predatory and abusive men, not trans people. We must not conflate the two. There is no evidence that predatory and abusive men have ever had to pretend to be anything else to carry out abusive and predatory behaviour."

"The Minister for Equalities must now report to parliament on what steps will be taken to ensure those at the government-funded Rape Crisis Scotland, who presided over the unlawful introduction of males within their single-sex service, are accountable for their part in this damaging dereliction of duty to service users."

"There’s an idea that I wanted to put to you. It’s not my idea but the group that came up with it have said that we should be using it in the campaign. And it’s the idea of a ‘readiness thermometer’. I don’t know if anyone’s seen that idea yet. So, the idea is you can have an actual installation which is a readiness thermometer. We could put it up in Glasgow or in Edinburgh, and it can be outside and it has a dial on it that moves. So when we’ve made all the plans for the currency for instance, or we’ve set up how we’re going to do something to do with defence, or whatever it is, that dial will move and it will inch forward. And the media can look at it, everyone can look at it, and it builds that confidence with the public so that when we get up to the 100 per cent, everybody in Scotland knows we’ve solved all these problems."

"But what I will say, whilst this legislation, which is deeply unpopular with the Scottish public, is blocked for now, what I would like to see is that this legislation is withdrawn and I would like to see the Scottish Government say they will never implement this bill."

"Amendments that could have prevented those on the sex offenders register from obtaining a gender recognition certificate (GRC) and strengthened the law on single sex prison allocation were voted down or withdrawn."

"Violent sex offenders have no place in the women's estate. Women's single-sex spaces for privacy, safety or therapeutic purposes are enshrined in the Equality Act 2010. These important protections will be impossible to uphold when anyone can decide they are a woman and have a GRC to prove their legal status."

"I think it’s welcome, I’m disappointed that unfortunately the Scottish Government has got itself into this mess to begin with, it didn’t have to do that."

"If you even think for one second, you cannot possibly drive prostitution underground. If you had a lot of women in underground cellars with a locked door, how would the punters get to them?"

"We owed her a debt of gratitude for helping the West reach a far better understanding of the emerging landscape in post-Soviet Russia and for shining a clearer light on the true nature of the occupation of Chechnya, a brutal conflict wilfully misprepresented as Russia's private front in the war on terror. No democracy is worthy of the name if freedom of the press is curtailed or writers and journalists are crushed; yet here was a writer who – at great personal risk – defied state intimidation to speak truth to power."

"As this collection of her writings shows, the reach of her journalism extended far beyond coverage of individual cataclysmic events. She frequently lifted the veil on more systematic inhumanity which did not attract as much international interest. Her tenacious investigations involved dogged correspondence and days sitting in court."

"Her fearlessness in the face of grave danger made her one of the few international journalists whom human rights activists and lawyers held in awe."

"I remember taking leave of her the night of the award [PEN] and asking whether she might not think of leaving Russia, at least temporarily. She held my hand, smiling, and said, 'Exile is not for me. That way they win'."

"[On the situation for women in Afghanistan after the 2020–2021 U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan] They were not allowed to leave home without a male escort. They were not allowed to go to work. They were not allowed to continue with their education. Their sex became the limitation on what they could do or be. This is true for all women and girls in Afghanistan under the Taliban reign."

"Anna painted a haunting portrait of Putin's Russia, a country governed by an administration which bore many of the hallmarks of Stalin's; here was a land whose own secret services suppressed civil liberties and where fear stalked universities, newsrooms and every corridor in which democracy might have flourished."

"Sometimes they are Afghanis who have worked for us. Sometimes they are Afghanis of a particular minority called the Hazara, who get slaughtered as soon as the Taliban look at them."

"This is Schindler's List time. These women were in mortal danger. They were running courts on things like domestic violence and child marriage and many of them locked up [the] Taliban. As soon as [the] Taliban came back they had to flee."

"I have still got women sending me the most tragic, terrible text messages and phoning me at all hours, saying "please help me, I am hiding in my basement, I didn't get on your planes in 2021 because my mother was dying, I couldn't leave at the time, but now they are after me.""

"In the year which is approaching, a century will have passed since the United States and the people of Canada and Great Britain terminated a great war by the Peace of Ghent. On both sides the combatants felt that war to be unnatural and one that should never have commenced. And now we have lived for nearly a hundred years, not only in peace, but also, I think, in process of coming to a deepening and yet more complete understanding of each other, and to the possession of common ends and ideals, ends and ideals which are natural to the Anglo-Saxon group, and to that group alone. It seems to me that within our community there is growing an ethical feeling which has something approaching to the binding quality of which I have been speaking"

"Indeed the civic community is more than a political fabric. It includes all the social institutions in and by which the individual life is influenced—such as are the family, the school, the church, the legislature, and the executive. None of these can subsist in isolation from the rest; together they and other institutions of the kind form a single organic whole, the whole which is known as the Nation."

"In the welter of sentimentality, amid which Great Britain might easily have mouldered into ruin, my valued colleague, Lord Haldane, presented a figure alike interesting, individual, and arresting. In speech fluent and even infinite he yielded to no living idealist in the easy coinage of sentimental phraseology. Here, indeed, he was a match for those who distributed the chloroform of Berlin. Do we not remember, for instance, that Germany was his spiritual home? But he none the less prepared himself, and the Empire, to talk when the time came with his spiritual friends in language not in the least spiritual. He devised the Territorial Army, which was capable of becoming the easy nucleus of national conscription, and which unquestionably ought to have been used for that purpose at the outbreak of war. He created the Imperial General Staff. He founded the Officers' Training Corps."

"There are few observers who have not been impressed with the wonderful unity and concentration of purpose which an entire nation may display—above all, in a period of crisis. We see it in time of war, when a nation is fighting for its life or for a great cause. We have seen it in Japan, and we have seen it still more recently even among the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula. We have marvelled at the illustrations with which history abounds of the General Will rising to heights of which but few of the individual citizens in whom it is embodied have ever before been conscious even in their dreams."

"A stranger to the spirit of the law as it was evolved through centuries in England will always find its history a curious one. Looking first at the early English Common Law, its most striking feature is the enormous extent to which its founders concerned themselves with remedies before settling the substantive rules for breach of which the remedies were required. Nowhere else, unless perhaps in the law of ancient Rome, do we see such a spectacle of legal writs making legal rights."

"Conscience and, for that matter, law overlap parts of the sphere of social obligation about which I am speaking. A rule of conduct may, indeed, appear in more than one sphere, and may consequently have a twofold sanction. But the guide to which the citizen mostly looks is just the standard recognised by the community, a community made up mainly of those fellow-citizens whose good opinion he respects and desires to have. He has everywhere round him an object-lesson in the conduct of decent people towards each other and towards the community to which they belong. Without such conduct and the restraints which it imposes there could be no tolerable social life, and real freedom from interference would not be enjoyed. It is the instinctive sense of what to do and what not to do in daily life and behaviour that is the source of liberty and ease. And it is this instinctive sense of obligation that is the chief foundation of society. Its reality takes objective shape and displays itself in family life and in our other civic and social institutions"

"The moral of the whole story is the hopelessness of attempting to study Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence apart from the history of its growth and of the characters of the judges who created it. It is by no accident that among Anglo-Saxon lawyers the law does not assume the form of codes, but is largely judge-made. We have statutory codes for portions of the field which we have to cover. But those statutory codes come, not at the beginning, but at the end. For the most part the law has already been made by those who practise it before the codes embody it. Such codes with us arrive only with the close of the day, after its heat and burden have been borne, and when the journey is already near its end."

"There is growing up a disposition to believe that it is good, not only for all men but for all nations, to consider their neighbours' point of view as well as their own. There is apparent at least a tendency to seek for a higher standard of ideals in international relations. The barbarism which once looked to conquest and the waging of successful war as the main object of statesmanship, seems as though it were passing away. There have been established rules of International Law which already govern the conduct of war itself, and are generally observed as binding by all civilised people, with the result that the cruelties of war have been lessened. If practice falls short of theory, at least there is to-day little effective challenge of the broad principle that a nation has as regards its neighbours duties as well as rights."

"Mr. Asquith had decided that the time had come when his Ministry ought to be reconstituted on a national instead of a party basis. He had invited the Conservative leaders to enter into a coalition, and they had agreed, but on conditions. One condition was that Haldane should not be included. A discreditable newspaper campaign had attacked him as pro-German, although in fact no man in the whole country had more clearly realised the danger of a German aggression, and no man had done more than he, as Secretary of State at the War Office, to initiate great reforms in the organisation, expansion, and equipment of the army to prepare it for such an eventuality. Haldane had been for many years an intimate friend of Asquith's and was his closest political associate. Now he had to choose—for the condition was insisted upon—between inflicting upon him what he knew to be a cruel injustice, or else failing in his duty to construct a combined Government to carry on the war."

"Neither in the Vedas, nor in any book .. .is there any allusion to a prior residence ... out of India ... There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one."

"Lord Mountstuart Elphinstone (1779-1859) in comparing the ancient Greeks with the ancient Hindus, says: "Their (Hindus) general learning was more considerable; and in the knowledge of the being and nature of God, they were already in possession of a light which was but faintly perceived even by the loftiest intellects in the best days of Athens.""

"In 1841, Mountstuart Elphinstone, the first Governor of the Bombay Presidency, wrote in his History of India: “No set of people among the Hindus are so depraved as the dregs of our great towns. The villagers are everywhere amiable, affectionate to their families, kind to their neighbours…. The Hindus are mild and gentle people…. Their superiority in purity of manners is not flattering to our self-esteem.”"

"It cannot be too well understood that our position in India has never been in any degree that of civilians bringing civilization to savage races. When we landed in India we found there a hoary civilization, which, during the progress of thousands of years, had fitted itself into the character and adjusted itself to the wants of highly intellectual races. The civilization was not perfunctory, but universal and all pervading - furnishing the country not only with political systems, but with social and domestic institutions of the most ramified description. The beneficent nature of these institutions as a whole may be judged from their effects on the character of the Hindu race. Perhaps there are no other people in the world who show so much in their character the advantageous effect of their own civilization. They are shrewd in business, acute in reasoning, thrifty, religious, sober, charitable, obedient to parents, reverential to old age, amiable, law-abiding, compassionate towards the helpless and patient under suffering."

"The common origin of the Sanscrit language with those of the west leaves no doubt that there was once a connection between the nations by whom they are used; but it proves nothing regarding the place where such a connection subsisted, nor about the time, (…) To say that it spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption."

"Such arguments were by no means uncontested. In 1841, Mountstuart Elphinstone objected that "it is opposed to their foreign origin that neither in the code [of Manu] nor, I believe, in the Vedas, nor in any book . . . is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India." Responding to some of the arguments that had been brought forward, he argued that "to say that [the original language] spread from a central point is a gratuitous assumption, and even contrary to language; for emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle." As far as he was concerned, "the question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present one, and as little for denying that they may have done so before the earliest trace of their records or tradition" (97-98)."

"Where, also, could the central point be, from which a language could spread over India, Greece and Italy, and yet leave Chaldaea, Syria and Arabia untouched? The question, therefore, is still open. There is no reason whatever for thinking that the Hindus ever inhabited any country but their present."

"There is no question of the superiority of the Hindus over their rivals in the perfection to which they brought the science. Not only is Aryabhatta superior to Diaphantus (as is shown by his knowledge of the resolution of equations involvll1g several unknown quantities, and in general method ofresolvll1g all indetermll1ate problems of at least the first degree), but he and his successors press hard upon the discoveries of algebraists who lived almost in our own time!"

"It is opposed to their foreign origin, that neither in the code of Manu nor I believe in the Vedas, nor in any book that is certainly older than the code, is there any allusion to a prior residence or to a knowledge of more than the name of any country out of India. Even mythology goes no further than the Himalayan chain in which is fixed, the habitation of Gods. It is unthinkable and beyond all canons of logic and common sense that the Hindus had forgotten their original home even at the time of the composition of the earliest Vedas. Christians look to Jerusalem for the origin of their religion, Muslims to Arabia, and Jews to Palestine, but the Hindus have all their sacred places within India itself. If they really had come from outside India, they should have some place of pilgrimage like Mecca or Benares. "To say that it (emigration) spread from a central point is a gratuitous presumption and even contrary to analogy for emigration and civilization have not spread in a circle but from east to west.""

"In the Surva Siddhanta is contained a system of trigonometry which not only goes beyond anything known to the Greeks, but involves theorem which were not discovered in Europe till two centuries ago."