The Quotable Irish

The Irish do not want anyone to wish them well; they want everyone
to wish their enemies ill.
-Harold Nicolson
When I get a very generous introduction like that, I explain that I'm
emotionally moved, but on the other hand I'm Irish and the Irish are
very emotionally moved. My mother is Irish and she cries during beer
commercials.
- Former U.S. General Barry McCaffrey
Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth
century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the
twentieth century.
- Author John McGahern
We have always found the Irish a bit odd. They refuse to be English.
- Winston Churchill
Well, it takes all kinds of men to build a railroad.
No sir, just us Irish.
- Railroad barons in "Dodge City," Warner Bros., 1939
Ireland, sir, for good or evil, is like no other place under heaven, and
no man can touch its sod or breathe its air without becoming better or
worse.
- George Bernard Shaw
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You know it's summer in Ireland when the rain gets warmer.
- Hal Roach
There is, for whatever reason, an international tendency to be welldisposed
towards Ireland - a tendency that elevates us beyond our
actual standing on the world stage.
- Ivana Bacik, Irish barrister and Labour Party candidate
"The Irish gave the bagpipes to the Scotts as a joke, but the Scotts
haven't seen the joke yet."
- Oliver Herford
I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.
- Edna O'Brien
The worst threat to Irish farmers is not foot and mouth disease, but a
postal strike.
- Popular saying in rural Ireland, referring to Irish farmers' heavy
dependence on government subsidy checks to survive.
The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad. For all
their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.
- G.K. Chesterton
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Ireland, thou friend of my country in my country's most friendless
days, much injured, much enduring land, accept this poor tribute from
one who esteems thy worth, and mourns thy desolation.
- George Washington, speaking of Ireland's support for America
during the revolution.
Rain is also very difficult to film, particularly in Ireland because it's
quite fine, so fine that the Irish don't even acknowledge that it exists.
- Alan Parker, director of "The Commitments"
There is no language like the Irish for soothing and quieting.
- John Millington Synge
It's not that the Irish are cynical. It's simply that they have a
wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.
- Brendan Behan
When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a
woman in the audience stood up and said, 'Yes, but is it the God of
the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don't
believe?
- Quentin Crisp
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Being Irish is very much a part of who I am. I take it everywhere with
me.
- Colin Farrell
Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy, which sustained him
through temporary periods of joy.
- William Butler Yeats
But I will say that living in Ireland has changed the cadence and
fullness of speech, since the Irish love words and use as many of
them in a sentence as possible.
- Anne McCaffrey
Even when they have nothing, the Irish emit a kind of happiness, a
joy.
- Fiona Shaw
Everything that we inherit, the rain, the skies, the speech, and
anybody who works in the English language in Ireland knows that
there's the dead ghost of Gaelic in the language we use and listen to
and that those things will reflect our Irish identity.
- John McGahern
If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to
listen, society here would be quite civilized.
- Oscar Wilde
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Irish Americans are no more Irish than Black Americans are Africans.
- Bob Geldof
Irish poets, learn your trade, sing whatever is well made, scorn the
sort now growing up all out of shape from toe to top.
- William Butler Yeats
My first thought when I came here was that I understood why there
are so many great Irish writers - because there is something mystical
in the air. There's always this cloudy, moody sky and it's challenging.
- Christopher Meloni
The Irish are the only men who know how to cry for the dirty polluted
blood of all the world.
- Norman Mailer
The Irish seem to have more fire about them than the Scots.
- Sean Connery
To marry the Irish is to look for poverty.
- J. P. Donleavy
You think the Welsh are friendly, but the Irish are fabulous.
- Bonnie Tyler
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Ireland is rich in literature that understands a soul's yearnings, and
dancing that understands a happy heart.
- Margaret Jackson
The problem with Ireland is that it