Great Irish Quotes

#1. There is no way in which we can retrospectively erase the Treaty of Vienna or the Great Irish Famine. It is a peculiar feature of human actions that, once performed, they can never be recuperated. What is true of the past will always be true of it.

Terry Eagleton

#2. 'You're Ugly Too' isn't a comedy, but it has a lightness of touch with a hard edge. But it's essentially a warm story tinged with a bit of melancholy in the great Irish tradition. I'm very proud of that film.

Aidan Gillen

#3. 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

#4. Yes, ruling by fooling, is a great British art with great Irish fools to practice on.

James Connolly

#5. I think there's nothing better than laughing in life, so that's nice, to be thought of as someone who can make someone laugh. It's 'cause I think life is hard. You know, my dad was a really silly man. A great Irish silly man. And that's fine.

Joan Cusack

#6. The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton
Parnell
never a man.

James Joyce

#7. To the great delight of two ducks, four cats, five hens and half a dozen Irish children; for they were out of the city for now.

Louisa May Alcott

#8. It is a great comfort to a rambling people to know that somewhere there is a permanent home
perhaps it is the most final of the comforts they ever really know.

Ben Robertson

#9. My parents are Irish, my grandparents are Irish, my great-grandparents are Irish. I was born in England; my blood is Irish.

Brian McDermott

#10. As far as Irish writers being great, I think the fact that there have been two languages in Ireland for a very long time; there has obviously been a shared energy between those two languages.

Garry Hynes

#11. The Butcher Boy is a very great novel indeed and a very important Irish novel. The ambiguity of that is, he's writing a book about an appalling situation and he does it in a hilarious way.

Stephen Rea

#12. Although the Irish language is connected with the many recollections that twine around the hearts of Irishmen, yet the superior utility of the English tongue, as the medium of all modern communication, is so great that I can witness without a sigh the gradual decline of the Irish language.

Daniel O'Connell

#13. You gotta understand, my great-grandfather was German and Irish. My grandmother was Indian, and my grandfather was African-American, so we all got a little something in us.

Tracy Morgan

#14. The six great gifts of an Irish girl are beauty, soft voice, sweet speech, wisdom, needlework, and chastity.

Theodore Roosevelt

#15. Because I'm Irish, I've always done an accent. Not doing an accent is off-putting because I sound like me. I love doing an accent. Doing the accent from West Virginia was great, and we had to get specific with it.

Eve Hewson

#16. Cara sipped her juice and then said, "Talking about de-stressing oneself ... " She laughed softly. "You've got to see the River Dancing Festival tonight at the park. It's great entertainment. They might even teach you how to River Dance. Sometimes they do that.:

Linda Weaver Clarke

#17. American audiences are great. They get what I am doing, but as my band will tell you, nowhere tops the Irish audience. They are just brilliant. They are very open, but the Americans and Spanish come a close second.

Imelda May

#18. When you get to speak Irish, you become more at one with yourself, you kind of have a spark when you use it, and I think it's a great dialect,

Glenn Quinn

#19. Before the Great Chicago Fire, no one took notice of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, two Irish immigrants who lived with their five children on the city's West Side.

Karen Abbott

#20. Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana.

Barbara Ehrenreich

#21. I loved Jack Ford. I got him in his later days, and he was a total tyrant and a total autocrat and an Irish drunk. But I had a great time.

Richard Widmark

#22. Irish history having been forbidden in schools, has been, to a great extent, learned from Raftery's poems by the people of Mayo, where he was born, and of Galway, where he spent his later years.

Lady Gregory

#23. The Irish are great for their tunes, but all their lovesongs are sad and their warsongs happy.

Colum McCann

#24. So many Irish actors overplay that modesty because they're afraid people will judge them and say, 'The state of yer man, he thinks he's great,' or whatever.

Jack Reynor

#25. For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions that Irish-Americans.

John F. Kerry

#26. James Joyce once called Guinness stout "the wine of Ireland." Indeed it's one of the most successful beers worldwide. Ten million glasses of this ambrosial liquid are consumed with great gusto each day.

Rashers Tierney

#27. Have you ever felt like you could walk through Hell and not get burned, or jump in a shark tank, causing the Great Whites to walk on land?... That's how I feel...like the baddest motherfucker that ever wore human skin." --Charlie Higgins 'Irish Demon

Jason E. Felts

#28. It was a kiss that slowed down as it went, a great, long adoring kiss, Tadhg slanting his mouth first to one side, then the other, drowning her in the unyielding, unstoppable claiming of his kiss.

Kris Kennedy

#29. The Danes and the Irish have a great simpatico, that's for sure.

Pierce Brosnan

#30. It's a great wonder to me, the Irish attachment to our history. What is it but a series of lamentations?

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

#31. The first time I started listening to Irish music, I had a very strong connection. Strangely enough, there's a great many Japanese melodies and vocal styles that sound very much like Hungarian music. You start seeing all these cross-references and comparative, independent musical cultures.

Tom Waits

#32. I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.

James A. Michener

#33. 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

#34. My mother was Irish; she had this great sense of humor, and both my parents loved films. There was a very vibrant discourse about politics and everything that was going on in the world where I grew up. So I was genetically predisposed to go into the performing arts.

Martin Donovan

#35. We call upon a God so great, amidst a very sacred date, to bless us with a mighty feast of wine and bread and beast. To Dagda of the Irish Isle, God of Earth with charming smile, we gently do invoke thy power; be with us on the witching hour.

Katerina Martinez

#36. I had great faith in Irish actors, that they'd be hip to the whole theatre thing, and they are. I had no illusions of coming over here as some kind of big shot. It's been a learning experience for me too.

Christopher Meloni

#37. The greatest problem with Irish Wolfhounds, though, is that they don't live very long: their great hearts give out. A good deal of this is genetic, of course, but I think it is in part that they worry so for us, care so much.

Edward Albee

#38. I'm very much for strengthening our industry at home. It's great now there's a lot of work happening but I think with Irish film in particular, the views were starting to get a little stereotypical and we were pigeonholing ourselves a little bit. We needed to get out of that.

Saoirse Ronan

#39. I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

James Comey

#40. Those who've known great sadness have a better appreciation for happiness. Those who've seen death know the value of life.

Suzanne Supplee

#41. I'm such an odd mix of things. My grandfather was Indian: I've got more family living in India than I do in the U.K. My old man was East London. I was brought up in Yorkshire. My great-grandfather was Irish.

Sebastian Coe

#42. The Irish aren't great singers, but they have great songs.

Bernadette Devlin

#43. I don't have any great love for Chicago. What the hell, a childhood around Douglas Park isn't very memorable. I remember the street fights and how you were afraid to cross the bridge 'cause the Irish kid on the other side would beat your head in. I left Chicago a long time ago.

Benny Goodman

#44. Making it [St. Patrick's Day] a great day for the Irish, but just an ok day if you're looking for a quiet tavern to talk, read or have a white wine spritzer.

Jon Stewart