Trust is the lifeblood of a decent society. The true currency of democracy. - Alex Salmond

It is an act of dubious legality, but above all one of unpardonable folly. [The bombing] may make matters even worse for the very people it is meant to be helping...if we are to sanction intervention in Serbia then the policy must be capable of achieving two things. It must be capable of weakening Milosevic and helping Kosovo. A bombing campaign will do neither, indeed the chances are it will make both worse.

[T]o get to a position where you say to a majority of our people that you cannot have single-sex spaces – prized and worked and strived for – because of some daft ideology imported from elsewhere and, as we’ve seen, imperfectly understood by its proponents in Scotland, borders on the totally absurd.
And the six per cent decline in independence vote over a month – think about that.
Thirty years of gradually building, building, building until we get independence over 50 per cent and then thrown away with some self-indulgent nonsense, which even if it was right, which it is nae, would hardly be tactically the most astute manoeuvre when we're meant to be taking Scotland to its next date with destiny."

They say the art of government - rather than the substance - is all about communication, but as far as this country is concerned I would go even further than that. I would say that Scotland is all about communication. This is a nation that loves to express itself, to retell old stories and share new ideas, to pass on information, to hear what's happening. We communicate passionately with each other as friends, as citizens, as family. It's a very deep human need and we feel it particularly strongly in Scotland ... It's perhaps not surprising that we couldn't wait for somebody else to invent the telephone or television.