Martin McGuinness Quotes

The British minister mistakes the Irish character. Had he intended to make Ireland a slave, he should have kept her a beggar. There is no middle policy … greatly emancipate or fundamentally destroy.

They won't break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then we'll see the rising of the moon.

I am a political prisoner. I am a political prisoner because I am a casualty of a perennial war that is being fought between the oppressed Irish people and an alien, oppressive, unwanted regime that refuses to withdraw from our land.

People and nations wither away without the freedom to question what is presented to them as the truth.

Those who suppress freedom always do so in the name of law and order.

Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.... An attempt to scrutinize men's thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.

Every dictatorship has ultimately strangled in the web of repression it wove for its people, making mistakes that could not be corrected because criticism was prohibited.

When the fear of jail disappears, repression puts heart into the people.

That was an interesting aspect: to go to war with the Church to fight for the very thing that the Church was meant to give to people.

Under dictatorship, the people in prison are always superior to the people who put them there.

We are not one people. We are two peoples. We are a people for Freedom and a people for Slavery. Between the two, conflict is inevitable.

The same people that are with me for not going to Vietnam because I saved them and their children.The same people will give me hell if I turn to them and say, 'let's free my people now'.They're with me on one part of my beliefs about the war, that's all. Not for my freedom.

Planning other people's actions means to prevent them from planning for themselves, means to deprive them of their essentially human quality, means enslaving them.

There are forces more powerful and pervasive than the apparatus of war. You may chain a man, but you cannot chain his mind. You may enslave him, but you will not conquer his spirit. In every decade since the war Soviet leaders have been reminded that their pitiless ideology only survives because it is maintained by force. But the day will come when the anger and frustration of the people is so great that force cannot contain it. Then the edifice cracks; the mortar crumbles; one day, liberty will dawn on the other side of the wall.

Where there is no freedom, there is death and destruction.

I came to the conclusion that war was an unacceptable way of solving whatever problems there were in the world--that there would be problems of tyranny, of injustice, of nations crossing frontiers and that injustice and tyranny should not be tolerated and should be fought and resisted, but the one thing that must not be used to solve that problem is war. Because war is inevitably the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. And that fact overwhelms whatever moral cause is somewhere buried in the history of that war.

We might have been a free and great people together.

Just wage a total war against these tyrants; I think we will do very well and our children will sing great songs about us years from now.

People are dying in vain because America isn't holding their end of the bargain up, as far as giving freedom and justice, liberty to everybody. That's something that's not happening.

May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence.

Slavery can never be abolished.

No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.

Totalitarianism is when people believe they can punish their way to perfection.

When you stop a dictator, there are always risks. But there are greater risks in not stopping a dictator.

A government which lays taxes on the people not required by urgent public necessity and sound public policy is not a protector of liberty, but an instrument of tyranny. It condemns the citizen to servitude.