Irish people Quotes (0-)

“That's the Irish people all over – they treat a serious thing as a joke and a joke as a serious thing.”

“Thus you have a starving population, an absentee aristocracy, and an alien Church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world. That is the Irish Question.”

“The women of Ireland have been voting and fighting on all kinds of issues. There's no question but that there would be a literature coming out of their experiences.”

“We're not British, we're not Saxon we're not English. We're Irish and proud we are to be. So fuck your Union Jack; we want our country back. We want to see old Ireland free once more.”

“The Irish are not in a conspiracy to cheat the world by false representations of the merits of their countrymen. No, sir, the Irish are a fair people—they never speak well of one another.”

“Of course there is more to Ireland than water sports. There is also the Irish people, a warm and friendly lot who are constantly saying things like "Begorrah!" Alcohol will do this to people.”

“What captivity has been to the Jews, exile has been to the Irish. For us, the romance of our native land begins only after we have left home; it is really only with other people that we become Irishmen.”

“German Bismarck said that the solution of the Irish question lay in having the Irish to swap countries with the Dutch. He added that the Dutch would make Ireland the most beautiful island in the world while the Irish would neglect to mend the dykes left to them by the Dutch and therefore would be drowned.”

“Charge of inferiority is an old dodge. It has been made available for oppression on many occasions...When England wants to set the heel of her power more firmly in the quivering heart of old Ireland, the Celts are an 'inferior race'... If he knows as much when he is sober as an Irishman knows when drunk, he knows enough to vote.”

“[T]he hospitable and generous Irishman has almost no friendship for any race but his own. As laborer and politician he detests the Italian. Between him and the German American citizen there is great gulf fixed…but the most naturalized thing for the Americanized Irishman is to drive out all other foreigners, whatever may be their religious tenets.”

“Stony seaboard, far and foreign,
Stony hills poured over space,
Stony outcrop of the Burren,
Stones in every fertile place,
Little fields with boulders dotted,
Grey-stone shoulders saffron-spotted,
Stone-walled cabins thatched with reeds,
Where a Stone Age people breeds
The last of Europe's stone age race.”

“The truth is, the people here [in Ireland] know nothing of the republican Negro hate prevalent in our glorious land. They measure and esteem men according to their moral and intellectual worth, and not according to the color of their skin. Whatever may be said of the aristocracies here, there is none based on the color of a man's skin.”

“You know, the great waves of immigration that brought our ancestors to the United States in succeeding decades carried millions more Irishmen across the sea. Most of them arrived with little more than with hope in their hearts and strength of their dreams and beautiful memories of an emerald green isle, a home they would never fully leave behind. I've never met an Irishman in America who doesn't think he—hope he can see Ireland someday. You know, their sweet—or, excuse me, their sweat is soaked with the foundations of communities across the Nation. All across America. You can't go anywhere and not find it. By the way, Tip O'Neill, the former Speaker of the House, used to say that he'd have a—he'd have a reception for all the Irish in the Congress, the House and the Senate, and all those who wished they were Irish.And everybody showed up.”

“These people were of all races, colors, and creeds.  French were in the north and in the Carolinas.  Dutch had built the town on Manhattan island, and their patroons' estates in the Hudson valley; now they were building their own cabins in the Mohawk Indian country that is now New York State.  Germans had settled in the Jerseys and in the far west, beyond Philadelphia.  Germans and Scotch-Irish were climbing the Carolina mountains; Swedes were in Delaware, English and French and Dutch and Irish were settled in Massachusetts, the New Hampshire Grants, Connecticut, and Virginia.  Mingled with all these were Italians, Portuguese, Finns, Arabs, Armenians, Russians, Greeks, and Africans from a dozen very different African peoples and cultures.  Black, brown, yellow and white, all these peoples were some of them free and some of them slaves.  Also they were intermarried with the American Indians.”

“I must say there is to me nothing more extraordinary than the determination of the Irish people to proclaim to the world that they are a conquered race. I have been always surprised that a people gifted with so much genius, so much sentiment, such winning qualities should be—I am sure they will pardon me saying it; my remark is an abstract and not a personal one—should be so deficient in self-respect. I deny that the Irish people are conquered as they are proud to tell us; I deny that they have any ground for that pride... I deny that the Irish are an ancient nation that have been conquered more than all ancient nations have been. I deny that the Irish have been conquered more than, or even as often, as the English. You never hear of an Englishman going about and boasting of his subjection. He boasts sometimes of having come over with William the Conqueror or rather of his ancestors having done so. The Irish have been conquered by the Normans and so have we, and in modern times I will not deny that Oliver Cromwell conquered Ireland, but it was after he had conquered England. William III could not have succeeded in conquering Ireland if he had not previously conquered England.”

“The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. The home, in short, of a people living the life that God desires that men should live. With the tidings that make such an Ireland possible, St. Patrick came to our ancestors fifteen hundred years ago promising happiness here no less than happiness hereafter. It was the pursuit of such an Ireland that later made our country worthy to be called the island of saints and scholars. It was the idea of such an Ireland - happy, vigorous, spiritual - that fired the imagination of our poets; that made successive generations of patriotic men give their lives to win religious and political liberty; and that will urge men in our own and future generations to die, if need be, so that these liberties may be preserved.”