Irishmen Quotes - Page 2

• As a member of the Protestant British squirearchy ruling Ireland, he was touchy about his Irish origins. When in later life an enthusiastic Gael commended him as a famous Irishman, he replied "A man can be born in a stable, and yet not be an animal.

  Duke of Wellington

  Animal, Men, Born

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• An Irishman will always soften bad news, so that a major coronary is no more than 'a bad turn' and a near hurricane that leaves thousands homeless is 'good drying weather'.

  Hugh Leonard

  Weather, News, Hurricanes

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• I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.

  Gilbert K. Chesterton

  Advice, Events, Realistic

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• I read the story and reread the story, but I still could not find the universality that the little Irishman had spoken of. All I saw in the story was some Irishmen meeting in a room and talking politics. What had that to do with America, especially with my people? It was not until years later that I saw what he meant ... I began to listen, to listen closely to how they talked about their heroes, to how they talked about the dead and how great the dead had once been. I heard it everywhere.

  Ulysses S. Grant

  Hero, Talking, Years

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• Can it be possible that the painters make John the Baptist a Spaniard in Madrid and an Irishman in Dublin?

  Mark Twain

  Pain, Baptists, Dublin

  Mark Twain (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Mark Twain (Illustrated)”, p.4285, Delphi Classics

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• The Irishman frees himself from slavery when he realizes the truth that the capitalist system is the most foreign thing in Ireland. The Irish question is a social question. The whole age-long fight of the Irish people against their oppressors resolves itself in the last analysis into a fight for the mastery of the means of life, the sources of production, in Ireland. Who would own and control the land? The people, or the invaders; and if the invaders, which set of them - the most recent swarm of land thieves, or the sons of the thieves of a former generation?

  James Connolly

  Mean, Fighting, Son

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• But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry.

  Chinua Achebe

  Beautiful, Passion, Heart

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• Consider the islands bearing the names of all the saints, bristling with forts like chestnut-burs, or Echinidæ, yet the police will not let a couple of Irishmen have a private sparring- match on one of them, as it is a government monopoly; all the great seaports are in a boxing attitude, and you must sail prudently between two tiers of stony knuckles before you come to feel the warmth of their breasts.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Couple, Attitude, Sea

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• There were two Irishmen eating sandwiches in a pub and the landlord said: "You can't eat your own food in here." So they swapped sandwiches.

  Frank Carson

  Funny, Humor, Two

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• Verily, chemistry is not a splitting of hairs when you have got half a dozen raw Irishmen in the laboratory.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Hair, Half, Dozen

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Cape Cod (Annotated Edition)”, p.171, Jazzybee Verlag

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• The doctors are all agreed that I am suffering for want of society. Was never a case like it. First, I did not know that I was suffering at all. Secondly, as an Irishman might say, I had thought it was indigestion of the society I got.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Doctors, Solitude, Suffering

  Henry David Thoreau (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Henry David Thoreau (Illustrated)”, p.1861, Delphi Classics

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• Alas! the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Hoe, Culture, Bogs

  Henry David Thoreau (2015). “Walden”, p.176, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I am one who fights without a knack of hoping confidentlysimply a Scotch-Irishman who will not be conquered.

  Woodrow Wilson

  Fighting, Scotch, Knack

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• I thought I was God's gift to mankind and the greatest Irishman since George Best.

  James Nesbitt

  Mankind

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• I'll tell you what you can expect from an Irishman named Wellington whose father was a bookmaker. You can expect that anything he says or writes may be repeated aloud in your own home in front of your children. You can believe he was taught to love and respect all mankind, but to fear no man.

  Wellington Mara

  Children, Father, Believe

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• I was walking across King's Cross station when a drunken Irishman came stumbling up and flung his arms around me. He wanted to thank me for the peace process in Northern Ireland.

  Ann Widdecombe

  Kings, Arms, Crosses

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• The shot Irishmen will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland, and beside the heroes of Poland and Sérbia and Belgium in Europe; and nothing in heaven or earth can prevent it.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Hero, Europe, Heaven

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• I swim in a pool of my own neurosis. I carry love, grief deeply, like an Irishman.

  Richard Harris

  Grief, Swim, Neurosis

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• Put an Englishman into the garden of Eden, and he would find fault with the whole blasted concern; put a Yankee in, and he would see where he could alter it to advantage; put an Irishman in, and he would want to boss the thing; put a Dutchman in, and he would proceed to plant it.

  Josh Billings

  Garden, Yankees, Eden

  "Josh Billings, Hiz Sayings". Book by Josh Billings, 1865.

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• It is rare that we use our thinking faculty as resolutely as an irishman his spade. To please our friends and relatives we turn out our silver ore in cartloads, while we neglect to workour mines of gold known only to ourselves far up in the Sierras, where we pulled up a bush in our mountain walk, and saw the glittering treasure. Let us return thither. Let it be the price of our freedom to make that known.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Thinking, Gold, Mountain

  Henry David Thoreau, David Gross (2007). “The Price of Freedom: Political Philosophy from Thoreau's Journals”, p.4, David M Gross

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• An Irishman can be worried by the consciousness that there is nothing to worry about.

  Austin O'Malley

  Worry, Ireland And The Irish, Consciousness

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• Ideally, we'd want an Irishman coming in for the job, but, ideally it doesn't really matter.

  Clinton Morrison

  Jobs, Want, Matter

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• As you know, I am neither Roman Catholic, Protestant Episcopalian, nor Presbyterian, nor am I an Irishman.

  John Bright

  Catholic, Protestants, Presbyterians

  John Bright (1869). “Speeches on Questions of Public Policy”, p.538

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• To subvert the tyranny of our execrable government, to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils and to assert the independence of my country- these were my objectives. To unite the whole people of Ireland, to abolish the memory of all past dissensions, and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter - these were my means.

  Wolfe Tone

  Country, Memories, Mean

  Sean Cronin, Richard Roche, Theobald Wolfe Tone (1973). “Freedom the Wolfe Tone way”

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• Every Irishman, the saying goes, has a potato in his head.

  Augustus Hare

  Potatoes

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