“There will be a lot of young men returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, who have seen terrible things, and who know all about the “loved and lost”, and they will be acting out their grief with reckless behaviour. When I see broken hearted young men, abusing alcohol and angry and trying to make sense of the senseless, I know and understand from my own experiences, something of what they have gone through.”

“And how do I know that the hate of death is not like a man who has lost his home when young and does not know where his home is to return to?”

“When I was young - really young - I used to think that the kids who had money, who were popular at school and who did well at things must have had horrible home lives - abusive parents or nasty siblings or lived in cupboard under stairs.It’s kind of sick when you think about it, but what I figured was that life should be fair - everyone had to have good and bad things in their lives, and no one could have a wholly good life or a wholly bad life because that would upset the balance of things.I know now that I was wrong.”

“The stories of young men searching for their fathers are the stories of young men who through their adventures father themselves by doing for themselves what they hoped a father would do for them. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")”

“For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love or not at all. I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil.”

“I would rather go out of politics having the feeling that I had done what was right than stay in with the approval of all men, knowing in my heart that I have acted as I ought not to.”