"What we saw in Northern Ireland was that it was only when we got beyond the politics of the last atrocity - when we had politicians of vision who were able to rise above that - that we saw any progress".

- Dr. Rory O'Hanlon speaking at a meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs, 31 January 2008

“…there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that endured spoliation's, famines, massacres in endless succession; that was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each time on returning consciousness took up the fight anew; a small nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never surrendered her soul”

 -  Éamon de Valera, National Radio Broadcast, 1945

"Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation".

- Robert Kennedy (1925 - 1968)

"We must recognise that we live with a finite resource. That is always the way. No country in the world has enough money to provide for the demand on the health service. If one provides for need one is doing well".

- Dr. O'Hanlon speaking at a meeting of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health & Children, 7 July 2009

"A  politician thinks of the next election. A statesman of the next generation".

- James Freeman Clarke (1810 - 1888)

"...When I visited Ghana, there was an outreach programme for AIDS being run by UNICEF, yet a local hospital a mile down the road was struggling to set up a similar programme. Neither organisation knew about the other, even though they were only a mile apart. Sometimes, a recession makes us think how we can make the service more efficient so that the necessary cuts can be avoided".

- Dr. Rory O'Hanlon speaking at the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Foreign Affairs, 3 September 2009

"A disposition to preserve, and an ability to improve, taken together, would be standard of a statesman".

- Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)

 "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit".

- Aristotle

"I consider it a public duty to answer falsifications with fact".

- Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882 - 1945)