"If it falls to me to start a fight to cut out the cancer of bent and twisted journalism in our country with the simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play, so be it."

"It's a fairly unique position; to have been in charge of prison funding and then to have been an inmate. I wish I'd been more generous."

"Far from being pro-Unionist, I do not want Ireland to be part of the United Kingdom. But, as a Wolfe Tone republican, I feel I have a firm duty to defend the rights of Protestants and Dissenters to do their own thing until such time as we can persuade them their future is in a federal Ireland."

"Above all, most Irish nationalists entertain the fiction of Irish exceptionalism, the false conviction that Ireland suffered more under British colonialism than any other comparable people. Let me be clear. I am not saying something nasty did not happen in the historical woodshed. What I am saying is that what happened was neither as nasty as we believe, nor did it last as long as we believe, nor was it all the work of some beastly British soldier passing by."

"The automatic assumption that everything a unionist does is wrong is not good for us. Like, how could everything that unionists do be wrong? I mean, they're not a special people. They're not a kind of special bad people."

"I am not a nationalist, I am a Wolfe Tone Republican. In pursuit of that ideal I have been forced to continually shift positions, much like a man in a cinema who keeps changing his seat, but only so he can get a clean view of the same film. And the title of the film, of which I never tire, is The Future Irish Republic."

"A brave endeavor To do thy duty, whate'er its worth, Is better than life with love forever And love is the sweetest thing on earth."

"All loved Art in a seemly way With an earnest soul and a capital A."

"I 'd rather be handsome than homely; I 'd rather be youthful than old; If I can't have a bushel of silver I'll do with a barrel of gold."

"The love of man and woman is as fire To warm, to light, but surely to consume And self-consuming die… But comrade-love is as a welding blast Of candid flame and ardent temperature: Glowing more fervent, it doth bind more fast; And melting both but makes the union sure. The dross alone is burnt—till at the last The steel, if cold, is one and strong and pure."

"The net of law is spread so wide, No sinner from its sweep may hide. Its meshes are so fine and strong They take in every child of wrong. O wondrous web of mystery ! Big fish alone escape from thee !"

"There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down."

"There is no dealing with great sorrow as if it were under the control of our wills. It is a terrible phenomenon, whose laws we must study, and to whose conditions we must submit, if we would mitigate it."

"The world," he resumed after a short pause, "has no faith in any man's conversion; it never forgets what he was, it never believes him anything better, it is an inexorable and stupid judge."

"How marvellously lie our anxieties, in filmy layers, one over the other! Take away that which has lain on the upper surface for so long – the care of cares – the only one, as it seemed to you, between your soul and the radiance of Heaven – and straight you find a new stratum there."

"He has attained supremacy in one particular line: he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer."

"My dear Duke, I know nothing of the joys of homo-sexuality. You must speak to my friend Oscar about that. And yet, if Shakespeare had asked me, I would have had to submit."

"Casanova! My dear man, Casanova is not worthy to untie my bootstrings!"

"I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers."

"... truth was a mortal enemy of beauty."

"Frank Harris has no feelings. It is the secret of his success. Just as the fact that he thinks other people have none either is the secret of the failure that lies in wait for him somewhere on the way of Life."

"The pleasure of being with you is in the clash of personality, the intellectual battle, the war of ideas. To survive you one must have a strong brain, an assertive ego, a dynamic character. In your luncheon-parties, in old days, the remains of the guests were taken away with the débris of the feast. I have often lunched with you in Park Lane and found myself the only survivor."

"Happiness is not essential to the artist; happiness never creates anything but memories."

"Strong men are made by opposition; like kites they go up against the wind."

"Christ goes deeper than I do, but I have had a wider experience."

"Just as work is the curse of the drinking classes of this country," [Wilde] said laughing, "so education is the curse of the acting classes."

"Shaw's relations with women have always been gallant, coy even. The number he has surrendered to physically have been few – perhaps not half a dozen in all – the first man to have cut a path through the theatre and left it strewn with virgins."

"Napoleon’s troops fought in bright fields, where every helmet caught some gleams of glory; but the British soldier conquered under the cool shade of aristocracy. No honours awaited his daring, no despatch gave his name to the applauses of his countrymen; his life of danger and hardship was uncheered by hope, his death unnoticed."

"Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill."

"I saw that my witticism was unperceived and quietly replaced it in the treasury of my mind."

"Do you know what I am going to tell you, he said with his wry mouth, a pint of plain is your only man."

"One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and inter-related only in the prescience of the author, or for that matter one hundred times as many endings."

"Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder."

"After a time," said old Mathers disregarding me, "I mercifully perceived the errors of my ways and the unhappy destination I would reach unless I mended them. I retired from the world in order to try to comprehend it and to find out why it becomes more unsavoury as the years accumulate on a man's body. What do you think I discovered at the end of my meditations?"

"Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular, and by nature it is interminable, repetitive, and nearly unbearable."

"I am completely half afraid to think."

"I felt so sad and so entirely disappointed that tears came into my eyes and a lump of incommunicable poignancy swelled tragically in my throat. I began to feel intensely every fragment of my equal humanity. The life that was bubbling at the end of my fingers was real and nearly painful in intensity and so was the beauty of my warm face and the loose humanity of my limbs and the racy health of my red rich blood. To leave it all without good reason and to smash the little empire into small fragments was a thing too pitiful even to refuse to think about."

"Is it life?" he answered, "I would rather be without it," he said, "for there is queer small utility in it. You cannot eat it or drink it or smoke it in your pipe, it does not keep the rain out and it is a poor armful in the dark if you strip it and take it to bed with you after a night of porter when you are shivering with the red passion. It is a great mistake and a thing better done without, like bed-jars and foreign bacon."

"My father...was a man who understood all dogs thoroughly and treated them like human beings."

"Strange enlightenments are vouchsafed to those who seek the higher places."

"The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles."

""When things go wrong and will not come right,"

""Who is Fox?", I asked."

"You mean that because I have no name I cannot die and that you cannot be held answerable for death even if you kill me?"

"You told me what the first rule of wisdom is," I said. "What is the second rule?" "That can be answered," he said. "There are five in all. Always ask any questions that are to be asked and never answer any. Turn everything you hear to your own advantage. Always carry a repair outfit. Take left turns as much as possible. Never apply your front brake first...If you follow them," said the Sergeant, "you will save your soul and you will never get a fall on a slippy road."

"Your talk," I said, "is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand."

"It cannot be too often repeated that I am not for sale. I was bought in 1921 and the transaction was final and conclusive."

"If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England and it would stop there only because it could go no lower."