I'll wear no convicts uniform nor meekly serve my time that Britain might brand Irelands fight 800 years of crime.

They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn't want to be broken.

All things must come to pass as one, so hope should never die. There is no height or bloody might that a freeman can’t defy. There is no source or foreign force can break one man who knows that his free will no thing can kill … and from that, freedom grows.

I'll wear no convicts uniform nor meekly serve my time that Britain might brand Irelands fight 800 years of crime.

We refuse to lie here in dishonor! We are not criminals, but Irishmen! This is the crime of which we stand accused.

I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

There can never be peace in Ireland until the foreign oppressive British presence is removed, leaving all the Irish people as a unit to control their own affairs and determine their own destinies as a sovereign people, free in mind and body, separate and distinct physically, culturally and economically.