“It is not a matter of ends justifying means: but of the creation of new means and new ends.”

“The English possessed as many words for stealing as the Irish had for seaweed or guilt.”

“Happy as a threaded needle”

“There is nothing worse than the ambitions of a talentless person.”

“The world's full of idiots, divas and assholes, mainly in Ireland. In Ireland, one cannot achieve anything if he is not a little wacky. That's a holy truth. It just simply cannot be otherwise.”

“Politics' the polite word for antediluvian prejudices, the rags put on by enmity and tribal resentment.”

“Any assemblage comprising human beings, any family, any party, any tribe, any nation, will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is often so much greater. Perhaps it abhors the outsider as camouflage for its own alarms; dreading what it would do to itself were the binding to fall asunder.”