The Scots Quotes

“Many Scots welcome people who actively choose to live in Scotland, who made a conscious decision to come north. Others resent those known as incomers, white settlers, interlopers and a row of other denigrating terms. In his novel Trainspotting, Irvine Welsh put these paradoxical thoughts in the mind of his hero, Renton: It’s nae good blaming it oan the English for colonising us. Ah don’t hate the English. They’re just wankers. We are colonised by wankers. We can’t even pick a decent, vibrant, healthy culture to be colonised by. No. We’re ruled by effete arseholes. What does that make us? … The most wretched, servile, miserable, pathetic trash that was ever shat intae creation.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Scots: A Genetic Journey

“At Falkland Palace, Andrew Melville famously reminded James VI in 1596 that: [t]hair is twa Kings and twa Kingdomes in Scotland. Thair is Christ Jesus the King, and His kingdom, the Kirk, whase subject King James the Saxt is, and of whase kingdome nocht a king, not a lord, not a heid, but a member.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Scots: A Genetic Journey

“It was impossible for Catus to understand that, in Celtic society, women had status and could rule. In Rome, women had the same legal standing as children.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Scots: A Genetic Journey

“Lindow Man’s death was protracted and almost certainly excruciating – there was no evidence that he had been given a drug. Almost certainly surrounded by priests and perhaps a large congregation gathered to witness an event of immense significance, the young man was first poisoned and then beaten. He was hit on the head with an axe but the blow did not kill him. He lived to be garrotted and have his throat cut. When the priests placed his naked body in Lindow Moss to drown, it is possible that, even at that moment, he was still alive. The victim suffered a multiple death, a rite sometimes known as the triple death, and this savagery survived in Druidic traditions well into the Dark Ages. Merlin or Myrddin was said to have been hit on the head, garrotted and drowned in the River Tweed.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Scots: A Genetic Journey

“NOT ONLY WAS THE weather miserable, with frequent rains and mists, Britain was also not worth having. The phenomenal expansion of the Roman Empire was driven by what Tacitus called the pretium victoriae, the ‘wages of victory’ or how much wealth could be extracted from the defeated by the conquerors. A sodden landscape, half-hidden by cloud, producing nothing more exciting than cattle, corn and a few substandard pearls, the place was thought simply incapable of delivering a decent return on all that outlay of men, materials and money. Roman commentators dismissed a conquest of Britain as making no sort of economic sense.”
― Alistair Moffat, The Scots: A Genetic Journey