Top 144 Scottish Quotes

I’ve always loved the fans in Scotland and have a little Scottish blood of my own.

I was an 18-year-old lad playing in a Scottish League Cup final at Hampden in front of 60,000 against Celtic. That’s an experience I will never forget.

I played football at school – but it was something you had to do up in Lanarkshire. But my first love was always motorcycles, and at the age of 11 I went into the Scottish schoolboy motocross trials.

I do feel Scottish in some way. Maybe it’s to do with visiting my grandparents here every summer as a child, but I am aware of my Scottish ancestry. It’s there all right, but it would be pushing it to label me a Scottish painter. Or, indeed, an anywhere painter.

I couldn’t afford to go to drama school in London. Then I met with the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, and I fell in love with the city. It was one of the few schools that offered me a place. It didn’t do me any harm.

I have Scottish genes: my grandfather was Scottish. My father was a voracious drinker. So, drinking came naturally to me.

The negative aspects of Scottish Nationalism are a kind of aggressive complacency, that sort of boasting; but that’s an expression of insecurity, I think, of a lack of confidence.

People do like to talk us down, it’s a Scottish thing. We are pessimistic, we look for the negatives all the time.

I think I have got quite a posh Scottish accent. It’s funny because I grew up in Oxgangs and Fife.

The Scottish fans are the best in the world. I love them.

I thought I was the only black Scottish person in the world.

I don’t think of myself particularly as a Scottish director, but you are what you are because the first ten years of your life, and where you spend them, brand you. In that sense, I’ll always be a Scottish director.

One thing the Scottish boys want in the changing room is the bragging rights over the English lads.

My dad’s Scottish, and I always used to say I was, too.

I feel British but my dad still has a filthy Scottish accent so I’m hearing that a lot… but the Davis Cup did help my exposure and my experience, so it was great for me.

I’d been wanting to work with James McAvoy since I was in drama school. I suppose there are parallels in that we’re Scottish, we went to the same drama school and share the same agent, but aside from that, he’s someone I’ve looked up to.

I was born in Peru, and we moved to Scotland when I was 15, but I’ve not lived here for a long time. But I would always say that I am Scottish, and Scotland is as close to a home as I have.

Alan Hutton and I are always fighting the corner for Scottish football. It’s a really tough league down here with a lot of quality players trying to get into the Premier League.

If you want to go way way back, then I’m Scottish. My great great grandfather was Scottish, James Gordon Harriott, and a white Scotsman too.

It’s quite a famous story that takes place on Christmas Eve, and the Germans, French, and Scottish are trying to make peace one night and they bury their dead and they play football. I play a German opera singer, in German, which I never have so I am really excited about that.

Scottish politics, U.K. politics, is not really like American politics in this respect. Not everybody is absolutely obsessed with image. I’m not saying the United States is obsessed with image.

I even like the Scottish weather because, like everywhere in the U.K., you can’t have great beauty without lots of rain.

I’m lucky to have my uncle there as he has been able to guide me through it a bit so I was not going into the unknown. He told me Scottish football is of a higher standard than a lot of English people expect.

Scottish football doesn’t suit me perfectly, how I want to play football.

Robert Burns enriched Scottish song with his genius and is mainly responsible for the rich treasure house of song that we enjoy today. He collected folk songs, retained the melodic line, kept what words were usable and rewrote the rest. He didn’t claim ownership.

I know Leeds have had a few Scottish captains but I don’t look too much to that because you can get lost in the history of the club. There’s so much good history but it’s all about the present and the future.

I remember how, back in the 1980s, the Scottish Flow Country became an object of bemused controversy as rich celebrities and businessmen from south of the border acquired great tracts of this vast wetland in the far north in order to plant non-native conifer plantations that attract hefty tax breaks.

The appellation of a Scottish Bard is by far my highest pride; to continue to deserve it is my most exalted ambition.

My mom came to the U.S. very young, and then she married very young. But she was never American. She was always Scottish and would make sure that I knew that I was, too.

I haven’t actually checked my family tree, but Rutherford is a very old Scottish name, so I’ve probably got Scottish genes a few generations back.

Apart from Scottish traditional music, I wasn’t really influenced by any kind of music. I just basically followed my own instincts.

My theory is that all of Scottish cuisine is based on a dare.

I read tons of comic books. My favourite is Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic writer.

I’m very proud of my Scottish blood.

Scotland’s political identity was destroyed, and a huge Scottish emigration to North America followed the brutal Highland clearances. These included every layer of Scottish society, not just the remnants of the defeated clans.

Both my parents are Scottish, and although I grew up in Canada after moving over, all of my family are proud to be Scots.

I love the 6 Nations rugby. I feel very Scottish then. I feel very Scottish now, sitting in the middle of Chelsea. But that’s part of our heritage – being part of Britain, part of Europe. I love being European.

I get recognised in the street, but that’s more from all the Scottish people who are down in Blackpool on their holidays.

I’m actually more German than Scottish. I’m half-Japanese, 25 percent German, 12 percent Scottish, and 12 percent Irish.

There wasn’t a Scottish nationalist MP elected at any general election when we were outside the E.U.

I didn’t really adapt to Scottish football well, but I enjoyed my time there. The physical nature and the pace of the game was a big thing, and many of the teams defended really deep against Celtic so there was not so much space to run in behind. That’s a big part of my game, so that was one thing as well.

Scottish writers are particularly successful in the crime genre.

On my best day, I cannot do Scottish people. I don’t even believe that’s a real accent, to be honest with you. I think they probably sound like us when they’re in the house. It’s how they keep people away from them.

Someone on the Scottish side of the family got me one and I never took it off. I would be down the country park playing in a Celtic strip in England.

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

I’m half Jewish, half Scottish. It’s hard for me to buy anything.

It is one of the little known facts about modern Scottish politics that it is not quite as cut-throat as people think it is.

When I started the Imagination Library in my hometown, I never dreamed that one day we would be helping Scottish kids.

I’ve always had far too much emotion to be Scottish.

A hunk of beef raised on Scottish moorland has a very different ecological footprint from one created in an intensive feedlot using concentrated cereal feed, and a wild venison or rabbit casserole is arguably greener than a vegetable curry.

I’ve said numerous times how proud I am to be Scottish and how proud I have been to compete for Britain, too, and I don’t think these two things necessarily have to be mutually exclusive.

The English are a tolerant bunch and, outside elements of the London elite, never much minded the rise of the Scottish Raj: after all, we were British, well-educated, reasonably cultivated and spoke with clear, classless accents.

I’ve never thought that being Scottish should mean there was any kind of barrier to me getting where I wanted to go, and I still feel like I can keep improving.

My favorite instrument is the snare drum. In Scotland, the snare drum is very prominent in Highland bands. The Scottish style of playing is in my blood. It’s a very powerful instrument, but it can also be soothing, like velvet. It’s a real challenge for composers.

In 2002, a Scottish journalist, during a dinner meant to be private, absolutely wanted me to react to Stephen Hawking’s comments. I said one shouldn’t pay too much attention to what Hawking was saying because he was a celebrity but not a specialist of elementary particle theory.

So many different countries have got their version of what Merlin is: the Scottish say he Scottish, the Welsh say he’s Welsh, the French say he’s French.

The Scottish public are a great public.

Maybe it’s the buildings, maybe it’s the weather, but you can see it affects us – that Scottish gallows humour; our tendency towards bleakness, to look at things in a negative way. Those definitely come out in my writing.