272 Quotes About Scotland

Autumn in the Highlands would be brief—a glorious riot of color blazing red across the moors and gleaming every shade of gold in the forests of sheltered glens. Those achingly beautiful images would be painted again and again across the hills and in the shivering waters of the mountain tarns until the harsh winds of winter sent the last quaking leaf to its death on the frozen ground.

As a result of the Scottish elite's surrender to English culture in the mid-eighteenth century the inarticulate Scot was subsequently found in evey 'rank' and 'order'.

...that famous motto that sits above Christopher Wren's tomb at Westminster Abbey... "If you seek his monument, look around you" - meaning London, 17th Century London. I think it's a motto that very much applies to the Scottish contribution to the modern World: that if you seek their monument, the Scots' monument, look around you.

Although Scotland has been a conspicuous beneficiary of British exploitation of the Third World, Scotland has been more resistant to the mystique of Empire than England. The Empire first impressed the English as a confirmation of their presumed right to govern and then flattered their ego by adopting many English institutions and attitudes as models for their own development. In return the Empire colonised a small but important part of England's sense of her own identity.

The land held in common was of vast extent. In truth, the arable, the cultivated land of Scotland, the land early appropriated, and held by charter, is a narrow strip of the riverbank, or beside the sea. The inland, the upland, the moor, the mountain, were really not occupied at all for agricultural purposes, or served only to keep the poor and their cattle from starving.

The [Second World] war may thus have acted as a forcing-bed, bringing to somewhat speedier development what was already securely rooted in the circumstances of our nation; and in this sense it may, perhaps, be said that: "The Scottish Renaissance was conceived in the First World War and sprang into lusty life in the Second World War.

...this nation must rank among the most enlightened in the universe. Politics, religion and literature have made of Scotland something beyond compare...

Equal marriage makes a huge impact, because people see gay people being allowed to be happy,” he says. “And these events involve families – and not just families but caterers and florists and hotels. And all these people are forced to accept that here are two people who are in love and want to build a family together . . . But I’m not complacent. Progress can falter, and rights can be taken away, and people can be repressed again very easily.

Scott and Terry created a political theatre in which a Hanovarian English monarch could appear on the stage of Edinburgh to act the part of a Stuart king.