Irish Quotes - page 11

I am who I am: an Irish Catholic kid, working class from Long Island. And I made it big. (Bill O'Reilly)
My mother's family were full-on Irish Catholics - faith in an elaborate old fashioned, highly conservative and madly baroque style. I sort of fell out of the tribe over women's rights and social justice issues when I was just 13 years old. View quote
Geraldine Brooks
I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay. View quote
John Boyne
I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American. View quote
John Cusack
The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese. View quote
John McGahern
They believed that Britain was in Ireland defending their own interests, therefore the Irish had the right to use violence to put them out. My argument was that that type of thinking was out of date. View quote
John Hume
The basic policy of the British Government was that since the majority of people in Northern Ireland wished to remain in the United Kingdom, that was that. We asked what would happen if the majority wanted something else, if the majority wanted to see Irish unity. View quote
John Hume
We will never abandon Ireland or the Irish people no matter what happens, because this solidarity is the very purpose of the European project. View quote
Emmanuel Macron
You're not falling for me, are you, Irish?" -Adam to Gabrielle. View quote
Karen Marie Moning
The Local Paper here asked that me books be banned........THE HIGHEST PRAISE for an Irish writer. View quote
Ken Bruen
I had wanted to write English crime novels based on the American hard-boiled style, and for the first two novels about Brixton, the critics didn't actually know I was Irish. (Ken Bruen)
I feel more Irish than English. I feel freer than British, more visceral, with a love of language. Shot through with fire in some way. That's why I resist being appropriated as the current repository of Shakespeare on the planet. That would mean I'm part of the English cultural elite, and I am utterly ill-fitted to be. View quote
Kenneth Branagh
My mum and my husband are from Irish backgrounds so we have a lot of potatoes. Chips, mashed, boiled, new potatoes, I love them all. Even the slightly wanky ones like Duchess potatoes that go up in a little spiral. View quote
Jo Brand
Instead of deluding public opinion with a notion that a sufficient application of force will provide a remedy, a wiser course would be to set about taking such steps as may be the means of recovering that consent without which society in Ireland cannot exist...[an offer should be made to the Irish] conceived on the most generous lines. View quote
Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
He became friends with some of the Irish nationalists.... he established a Dublin Indian Society with the 100 Indian students who were there at the time. The emebers discarded the hat. They viewed the hat as a symbol of the Britisher. Instead they took to the Fez cap. View quote
V. V. Giri
BALTHAZAR: I have a private coat for Italian stilettos, I can be treacherous with the Walloon, drunk with the Dutch, a chimney-sweeper with the Irish, a gentleman with the Welsh and true arrant thief with the English. What then is my country to me? View quote
Thomas Dekker
Rossa's Recollections 1838 to 1898: Memoirs of an Irish Revolutionary by O'Donovan Rossa. Published by Globe Pequot, 2004. ISBN 1-59228-362-4. View quote
Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa
This rooting out of the Irish people; this transplanting of them from their native home into a foreign land, may be all very well, so far as the young people are concerned; but for the fathers and mothers who have reared families in Ireland, it is immediate decay and death. View quote
Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa
I proposed that it be called the "Phoenix National Literary Society" – the word Phoenix signifying that the Irish cause was again to rise from the ashes of our martyred nationality. View quote
Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa
There were other fellow-sufferers, lower-case ones: the thousands who were either killed, maimed or bereaved by the devotees of the Irish Republic in Mr Sands's organization, the Provisional IRA. Those other dead, however, being the wrong kind, are implicitly excluded from what is seen as a celestial tête-à-tête. View quote
Conor Cruise O'Brien
Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift is more Irish than Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English. (Conor Cruise O'Brien)
I expected a lot of negative reactions to my critique of aspects of Irish nationalism, and I got a fiercely negative set of reactions of course from sympathisers with Sinn Féin and the IRA, that is to say, people who are so nationalist they were prepared to kill for nationalist objectives. View quote
Conor Cruise O'Brien
To this day I don't know why they voted for me. I'm hoping that it was because I chose a talent that made them sit up. I played a 70-year-old Irish mother lamenting the loss of her last son to the sea. I took off all my makeup, wore a shawl and my father's black socks - the costume I had worn when I'd done the play when I was in high school. It was the only thing I knew to do. I'm an actress, that's what I wanted to be. View quote
Lee Meriwether
I grew up in a predominantly Caucasian neighborhood, but my mom is Filipino-Spanish and my dad is Irish. View quote
Shay Mitchell
If Irish were to die completely, the standard of English here, both in the spoken and written word, would sink to a level probably as low as that obtaining in England and it would stop there only because it could go no lower. View quote
Flann O'Brien