Bernadette Devlin Quotes

We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.

I'm not good enough to be a saint and not bad enough to be interesting.

Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.

I think my life will always be worth living, though I don't imagine it being very easy.

My function in life is not to be a politician in Parliament: it is to get something done.

But I make a distinction between the doctrines of the Church, which matter, and the structure invented by half a dozen Italians who got to be pope and which is of very little use to anybody.

It did not seem to me that prejudice, poverty, discrimination, repression and racism were confined to the North of Ireland. I could see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it wasn't my business.

There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents-if the term is to be used at all.

Irish Catholics are more interested in the rosary beads than in the rosary.

It wasn't long before people discovered the final horrors of letting an urchin into Parliament.

I went to a very militantly Republican grammar school and, under its influence, began to revolt against the Establishment, on thesimple rule of thumb, highly satisfying to a ten-year-old, that Irish equals good, English equals bad.

Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

The Irish aren't great singers, but they have great songs.

To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else

... in Northern Ireland, if you don't have basic Christianity, rather than merely religion, all you get out of the experience of living is bitterness.