Bernadette Devlin famous quotes

03-24-2025

Yesterday I dared to struggle. Today I dare to win.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Time #Struggle #Winning
To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Hippie #May #Gains
It did not seem to me that prejudice, poverty, discrimination, repression and racism were confined to the North of Ireland. I could see them everywhere I spoke and still cannot comprehend the mentality that argues that I should have pretended not to see them, because it wasn't my business.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Racism #Prejudice #Poverty
My function in life is not to be a politician in Parliament: it is to get something done.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Done #Life Is #Politician
Free love is too expensive.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Love #Love Is #Free Love
The Irish aren't great singers, but they have great songs.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Song #Singers #Ireland
Should an anthropologist or a sociologist be looking for a bizarre society to study, I would suggest he come to Ulster. It is one of Europe's oddest countries. Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody's lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Country #Technology #Europe
But I make a distinction between the doctrines of the Church, which matter, and the structure invented by half a dozen Italians who got to be pope and which is of very little use to anybody.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Church #Use #Half
I think my life will always be worth living, though I don't imagine it being very easy.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Thinking #Imagine #Easy
Basically, I have no place in organized politics. By coming to the British Parliament, I've allowed the people to sacrifice me at the top and let go the more effective job I should be doing at the bottom.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Letting Go #Jobs #Sacrifice
I got quite bored, serving in the bar. Since I was there, the customers wouldn't talk about women, and with half their subject matter denied them, it was: horses, silence; horses, silence.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Horse #Bored #Silence
Among the best traitors Ireland has ever had, Mother Church ranks at the very top, a massive obstacle in the path to equality and freedom. She has been a force for conservatism... to ward off threats to her own security and influence.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Mother #Equality #Church
We were born into an unjust system; we are not prepared to grow old in it.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Unjust #Born #Grows
It wasn't long before people discovered the final horrors of letting an urchin into Parliament.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Letting Go #Long #People
There are no illegitimate children, only illegitimate parents-if the term is to be used at all.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Children #Justice #Parent
One American said that the most interesting thing about Holy Ireland was that its people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ. And they do!
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Jesus #Hate #Names
I'm not good enough to be a saint and not bad enough to be interesting.
-- Bernadette Devlin

#Interesting #Not Good Enough #Saint

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