People are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles.

Independence, the freedom of a self-governing nation, is in my estimation the highest political good, for which any disadvantage, if need be, and any sacrifice are a cheap price.

Paisley has been and remains a greater threat to the Union than the Foreign Office and the Provisional IRA rolled into one.

Lift the curtain and 'the State' reveals itself as a little group of fallible men in Whitehall, making guesses about the future, influenced by political prejudices and partisan prejudices, and working on projections drawn from the past by a staff of economists.

History is littered with the wars which everybody knew would never happen.

We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

I do not keep a diary. Never have. To write a diary every day is like returning to one's own vomit.