Scots quotes

Half-owre, half-owre to Aberdour, 'Tis fifty fathoms deep, And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens, Wi' the Scots lords at his feet.

-Ballads
'Sir Patrick Spens'.

Scots, wha hae wi' Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victorie! Now's the day, and now's the hour; See the front o' battle lour; See approach proud Edward's power, Chains and Slaverie!

- Robert Burns
  'Bruce's  Address at Bannockburn', stanza1.

This will be the issue of that darling Plea, of being one and not two; it will be turned upon the Scots with a Vengeance; and their 45 Scots Members may dance round to all Eternity, in thisTrap of their own making.

- Andrew Fletcher (of Saltoun)
  State of the Controversy betwixt United and Separate Parliaments, a critique of the proposed Union.

My aim all along has been (in Ezra Pound's term) the most drastic desuetization of Scottish life and letters, and, inparticular, thede-Tibetanizationofthe Highlands and Islands, and getting rid of the whole gang of high mucky-mucks, famous fatheads, old wives of both sexes, stuffed shirts, hollow men with headpieces stuffed with straw, bird-wits, lookers-under-beds, trained seals, creeping Jesuses, Scots Wha Ha'evers, village idiots, policemen, leaders of white-mouse factions and noted connoisseurs of bread and butter, glorified gangsters, and what 'Billy' Phelps calls Medlar Novelists (the medlar being a fruit that becomes rotten before it is ripe),Commercial Calvinists, makers of 'noises like a turnip', and all the touts and toadies and lickspittles o the English Ascendancy, and their infernal women-folk, and all their skunkoil skulduggery.

-Grieve
  Lucky Poet, ch.3,'The Kind of Poetry I  Want'.

Scots are Jocks,WelshmenTaffies, and Irishmen Paddies or Micks but†it is noticeable there is no similar designation for the English.

- Anna Pavlova
  The English: A Portrait of a People.

Nothing gives the Scots more pleasure than to hear the English abused.

-Pius II real name Enea Silvio de Piccolomini
  Commentaries. Quoted inJ H Plumb (ed) The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (1961, new edn by Penguin,1982).

Even though his tongue acquire the Southern knack, he will still have a strong Scots accent of the mind.

- Robert Louis Stevenson
  Memories and Portraits, ch.1,'The Foreigner at Home'.