The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.

A good man giving bad advice is more dangerous than a nasty man giving bad advice.

You are not an agnostic.....You are just a fat slob who is too lazy to go to Mass.

Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it.

You can safely appeal to the UN in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: 'Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.' Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken.

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.