Gerry Adams Quotes

The basic policy of the British Government was that since the majority of people in Northern Ireland wished to remain in the United Kingdom, that was that. We asked what would happen if the majority wanted something else, if the majority wanted to see Irish unity.

Why should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragment of England - Ireland is not a geographical fragment, but a nation.

If there is a vote in Britain to leave the E.U. there is a democratic imperative to provide Irish citizens with the right to vote in a border poll to end partition and retain a role in the E.U.

Irish nationalists can never be the assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation. The two nation theory is to us an abomination and a blasphemy.

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.

I descend from both Philadelphia Quakers and Carolina colonists whose families were separated by the Revolutionary War. That helped give me insight into the agony of Patriots who, until the British government denied their claims, had always, like Ben Franklin himself, thought of themselves as free-born Englishmen.

One day, Mexico will have a leader who is nationalist not simply in rhetoric, but also in fact.

You can have Irish identity in the north and also have your Irish passport.

There can be no perfect Europe in which Ireland is denied even the least of its national rights.

The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.

At this moment, when Ireland seems about to break into something new, we thought it was worth looking back at a time when people seemed to have found a way out of the sectarian division of the country.

We would not give up our own country - Ireland - if we were to get the whole world as an estate, and the Country of the Young along with it.

Is there to be no living Irish nation?

I never met anyone in Ireland who understood the Irish question, except one Englishman who had only been there a week.

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.

Every Irish person, good or bad, hates to see Ireland divided. But they differ profoundly as to how it should be united.

I am very sure of the ground I stand on. I am also very sure that it is the path shared by republicans across this island genuinely interested in building a new agreed Ireland: republicans who put Ireland before ego, criminality, and self-gain.

The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was a time of restatement in Ireland. After the famine, after the failed rebellions of the Forties and Sixties, the cultural and political desires for self-determination began to shape each other in a series of riffs on independence and identity.

Unless people who voted for unionist parties are suddenly going to vote for a united Ireland, which I don't believe will happen, a border poll will be defeated.

The State is the sum total of the sacrifice, on its behalf, of its members.

Every head of state and government in the world is allowed to have his opinion and to voice it.

I deem no government safe which is under the vassalage of any self-constituted authorities, or any other authority than that of the nation, or its regular functionaries.

America is greatest country; but not our government.

In a government like ours, the Crown is the abiding and unshakable element in government; politicians may come and go, but the Crown remains and certain aspects of our system pertain to it which are not dependent on any political party. In this sense, the Crown is the consecrated spirit of Canada.

However it may be for others, for us of the Citizen Army there is but one ideal - an Ireland ruled, and owned, by Irish men and women, sovereign and independent from the centre to the sea, and flying its own flag outward over all the oceans.