Bobby Sands Quotes

Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal

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 may die, but the Republic of 1916 will never die. Onward to the Republic and liberation of our people.

My life now centered around sleepless nights and stand-bys, dodging the Brits and calming nerves to go out on operations. But the people stood by us. The people not only opened the doors of their homes to lend us a hand, but they opened their hearts to us. I learned that without the people, we could not survive and I knew that I owed them everything.

We refuse to lie here in dishonor! We are not criminals, but Irishmen! This is the crime of which we stand accused.

They have nothing in their whole imperial arsenal that can break the spirit of one Irishman who doesn’t want to be broken.

They will not criminalise us, rob us of our true identity, steal our individualism, depoliticise us, churn us out as systemised, institutionalised, decent law-abiding robots. Never will they label our liberation struggle as criminal.

All things must come to pass as one, so hope should never die. There is no height or bloody might that a freeman can’t defy. There is no source or foreign force can break one man who knows that his free will no thing can kill … and from that, freedom grows.

I am standing on the threshold of another trembling world. May God have mercy on my soul.

Generations will continue to meet the same fate unless the perennial oppressor-Britain-is removed, for she will unashamedly and mercilessly continue to maintain her occupation and economic exploitation of Ireland to judgment day, if she is not halted and ejected.

I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom.

Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.