"Wallace made Scotland, he is Scotland; he is the symbol of all that is best and purest and truest and most heroic in our national life. You cannot figure to yourself Scotland without Wallace. So long as grass grows green, or water runs, or whilst the mist curls through the corries of the hills, the name of Wallace will live."
Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham - Wallace Day, 1920
"The story of Wallace poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there until the floodgates of life shut in eternal rest."
Robert Burns
"O Thou! who poured the patriotic tide,
That stream'd through Wallace's undaunted heart;
Who dar'd to, nobly, stem tyrannic pride,
Or nobly die, the 2nd glorious part"
Robert Burns
"At Wallace' name
What Scottish blood
but boils up in a springtide flood!"
Robert Burns
"Only a noble conception of Scotland could have inspired the noble sacrifice made by Wallace. It was not for the Scotland of a day that he fought and died, but for the Scotland of all future time. We are Wallace's betrayers if we lose our national spirit, and waste or renounce our national heritage. If certain sycophantic historians have belittled Wallace, it was because they perceived that he stood for a Scotland which was real, independent, active, progressive and democratic, a Scotland of the Scottish people. For that he stands immortally."
William Power - Wallace Day, 1936
"They throng to view him now
Who in the field had fled before his sword,
Who at the name of Wallace once grew pale
And falter'd out a prayer"
Robert Southey - 1798
"Of his good deeds and manhood
Great gestes and songs are made
But yet so many, I trow nocht
As he in his days wrocht
Who all his deed of price would dite
Him worthied a great book to write
And all that to write in here
I lack both wit and good leisure."
Andrew of Wyntoun - c 1420
"He was appointed Guardian of the kingdom not so much by election as by divine intervention, for by a wonderful vision it was shown to various persons worthy in the faith that the most holy apostle Andrew, protector and patron of the kingdom, by hand committed a bloody sword to William Wallace, strictly commanding him to use it everywhere in the kingdom by expelling the English."
Walter Bower - c 1440
"First, here I honour, in particular,
Sir William Wallace, much renown'd in war;
Whose bold progenitors have long time stood,
Of honourable and true Scottish blood."
Blind Harry, c 1470
"All this may be, the people's voice is odd;
The Scots will fight for Wallace as for God."
Alexander Pope, c 1720
"Thus perished Wallace, whom Edward could never subdue. In his last moments, he asserted that independency which a whole nation had renounced. It is singular that Edward should have pardoned, favoured, and even trusted, the persons who had often made, and as often violated, their oaths of obedience; while the man who never acknowledged his sovereignty fell, the single figure of his resentment."
Lord Hailes - 1797
"...I would relate
How Wallace fought for Scotland; left the name
Of 'Wallace' to be found, like a wild flower,
All over his dear country, left the deeds
Of Wallace, like a family of ghosts,
To people the steep rocks and river banks,
Her natural sanctuaries, with a local soul
Of independence and stern Liberty!"
William Wordsworth - 1814
"Wallace was the architect of his nation's freedom, but like Moses, he did not live to enter in to his promised land. By his own people he was betrayed in to the hands of the English who executed and dismembered him, displaying his mutilated parts and making up in thoroughness what they lacked in chivalry."
Dr John Purser - 1996
"Wallace the diplomat is an intriguing picture. This soldier, accustomed to peril, used to sleeping rough during his many campaigns, must surely have found it strange that he, second son of a small Renfrewshire knight, was visiting the home of the most potent power of the western world."
David R Ross - 1999
"Too dangerous for his own time, he became the Scottish hero of all time, the humble Scot who would teach kings and nobles where their duty lay, while he himself would live free or freely die for the liberty of his nation."
Edward Cowan - 2007
"The interest of the professional historian in Wallace is a relatively recent phenomenon"
Elspeth King, 2007
"If William Wallace had left us his thoughts in the face of his imminent execution, he might have done worse than pre-empt Mary, Queen of Scots with the famous words 'In my end is my beginning.' "
Fiona Watson - 2007
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