Conor Cruise O'brien Quotes

#1. 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.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#2. All five hundred boys want to go out with the same ten anorexic girls." She said, "I'm a good musician, but not many guys are looking for a girl that plays great Bach preludes.

Mary Pipher

#3. Usually redemption implies rescue - being saved. What were you being saved from?' he inquired, his voice carefully neutral. 'Ugliness.

Amy Harmon

#4. Death makes its own choices.
Has reasoning an order has a taste ...

Angelo Tsanatelis

#5. You are not an agnostic ... You are just a fat slob who is too lazy to go to Mass.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#6. Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#7. You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#8. Human nature doesn't include all human beings. There are human beings who are indifferent to politics, religion, virtually anything.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#9. And that we call enos ermarf."

"What?" I didn't see what he was pointing at.

"That. The way the lake curves forward into t grass, framed by derrishoul trees."

"You have a word for something like that?" I asked.

-Animorphs #4, The Visitor page 63

K.A. Applegate

#10. A journey of 1,000 miles starts with just 10 digits.

Gayle Forman

#11. Today, as a result of the policy of Macmillan's Government, Great Britain presents in the United Nations the face of Pecksniff and in Katanga the face of Gradgrind.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#12. What is so priceless about being the selves we were created to grow into is that it's impossible to do it wrong.

Victoria Moran

#13. The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could; it is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine ... a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#14. Weak mortals, chained to the earth, creatures of clay as frail as the foliage of the woods, you unfortunate race, whose life is but darkness, as unreal as a shadow, the illusion of a dream.

Aristophanes

#15. In the last century the Arab thinker Jamal al-Afghani wrote: 'Every Muslim is sick and his only remedy is in the Koran.' Unfortunately the sickness gets worse the more the remedy is taken.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#16. Nothing does more to activate Christian divisions than talk about Christian unity.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#17. The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#18. The sea which we think of separating the two island actually joins them.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#19. A good man giving bad advice is more dangerous than a nasty man giving bad advice.

Conor Cruise O'Brien

#20. The forces which are working out the great scheme of perfect happiness, taking no account of incidental suffering, exterminate such sections of mankind as stand in their way, with the same sternness that they exterminate beasts of prey and herds of useless ruminants.

Herbert Spencer