It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancées whom they have never seen.

Of course I am very proud of being a Tory. Yes, in my head and in my heart I regard myself as a Tory. As I have said, I was born that way; I believe it is congenital. I am unable to change it. That is how I see the world... [The EEC] is the most un-Tory thing that can be conceived.

If I cannot understand my friend's silence, I will never get to understand his words.

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

I have set and always will set my face like flint against making any difference between one citizen of this country and another on grounds of his origin.

All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.

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