History Ireland Quotes

#1. History is an amazing presence
it is the place where vanished time gathers. While we are in the flow of time, it is difficult to glean its significance, and it is only in looking back that we can recognize the hidden dimensions at work within a particular era or epoch.

John O'Donohue

#2. The Irish people didn't get on that well with each other either. They hated the Catholics, was the main issue, as I see. You can't blame them for that. If I understand correctly, Catholics do not believe in contraception. So, you know, sex is not relaxing.

Jaclyn Moriarty

#3. The Scots (originally Irish, but by now Scotch) were at this time inhabiting Ireland, having driven the Irish (Picts) out of Scotland; while the Picts (originally Scots) were now Irish (living in brackets) and vice versa. It is essential to keep these distinctions clearly in mind (and verce visa).

W.C. Sellar

#4. The 1916 uprising was kind of the most important rebellion in Ireland's fight for independence that had been going on for 700 years. So it's a very important moment in history for us.

Saoirse Ronan

#5. I am a war man in the day of war, but I am a peace man in the day of peace.

Michael Collins

#6. ...early medieval Ireland sounds like a somewhat crazed Wisconsin, in which every dairy farm is an armed camp at perpetual war with its neighbors, and every farmer claims he is a king.

David Willis McCullough

#7. History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past ... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

Alan Bullock

#8. More Irishmen died fighting for Britain in World War I than died fighting against her in all of Ireland's bids for independence combined.

David Frum

#9. The reality of life in Northern Ireland is that if you were Protestant, you learned British history, and if you were Catholic, you learned Irish history in school.

James Nesbitt

#10. I am not in the business of pointing fingers or making excuses. However, recent history has shown that I, like thousands of others in Ireland, incorrectly relied upon the persons who guided Anglo and who wrongfully sought to portray a 'blue chip' Irish banking sector.

Sean Quinn

#11. Any good history begins in strangeness. The past should not be comfortable. The past should not a familar echo of the present, for if it is familar why revist it? The past should be so strange that you wonder how you and people you know and love could come from such a time.

Richard White

#12. Like a lot of stupid people, it took a great deal to get an idea into the king's head, but once there, there was no shifting it.

Richard Killeen

#13. For a tiny speck in the Atlantic, Ireland has made an outsize contribution to world literature. It's a legacy we can all be proud of, one that would take many pages (or indeed a whole library of books) to recount in full.

Rashers Tierney

#14. I call on everyone of goodwill both in Ireland and abroad to join now in ensuring that the beginning of peace becomes a reality, before this year is out. Let us together open a new era in our history.

Albert Reynolds

#15. History is the enemy of memory.

Richard White

#16. Everything in my head was secondhand, too: Catholicism; Ireland's sad history, a litany of suffering and martyrdom drummed into me by priests, schoolmasters and parents who knew no better.

Frank McCourt

#17. Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death; but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.

Thomas Francis Meagher

#18. A nation which fails to adequately remember salient points of
its own history, is like a person with Alzheimer's. And that can be a
social disease of a most destructive nature.

S.M. Sigerson

#19. Redmond Howard, a politically aware witness to the Rising and a critic of the rebels, wrote in its aftermath: 'There never was, I believe, an Irish crime -- if crime it can be called -- which had not its roots in an English folly.

Tim Pat Coogan

#20. As to the old history of Ireland, the first man ever died in Ireland was Partholan, and he is buried, and his greyhound along with him, at some place in Kerry.

Lady Gregory

#21. World War One is an important part of Ireland's multi-layered history during which tens of thousands Irish people lost their lives.

Martin McGuinness

#22. Scarlett O'Hara's father, Thomas, is an Irish immigrant who names his plantation Tara, after the home of the High Kings in Ireland. In an appealing nod to the "luck of the Irish," we read that Thomas O'Hara won his lands in a card game!

Rashers Tierney

#23. Being Irish and a citizen of the world, has made me truly appreciate Irish culture, music and history. Whether you're first, second generation Irish or even with no connection to Ireland, you should visit in 2013 for a unique experience.

Liam Neeson

#24. Love is never defeated, and I could add, the history of Ireland proves it.

Pope John Paul II

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

Dorothy Salisbury Davis

#26. The basis on which the Good Friday agreement was constructed was in addressing those problems in the history of Northern Ireland, the social and constitutional problems as well as the military problems that have been unaddressed for centuries.

John Reid

#27. England and Ireland may flourish together. The world is large enough for both of us. Let it be our care not to make ourselves too little for it.

Edmund Burke

#28. 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

#29. And if I was bewildered through those decades, totally bewildered, so was the country I came from. The majority, what was the phrase? 'Condemn utterly what is happening, this barbarity.' But that's all we did. Condemn. And march. But not often enough.

Josephine Hart

#30. The ending of partition was inevitable because Ireland was one nation by history and tradition , by facts of race, geography, and economy

Seamus Costello

#31. I know there's some kind of history to mountain music-like it came from Ireland or England or Scotland and we kept up the tradition.

Loretta Lynn

#32. Finland had a civil war less than 100 years ago, just like in Ireland. If you look at the history of newly independent nations, civil war is almost every time present, even in the United States.

Harri Holkeri

#33. When you travel the world, you have to watch and you have to listen. We're not going to come in to Ireland without an understanding that there's a history that's very sensitive.

Chuck D

#34. [These]were the legitimate acts of self-defense which had been forced upon the Irish people by English aggression... We did not initiate the war, nor were we allowed to choose the battleground.

Michael Collins

#35. Old, is it?" the man asks.
"Yes, very."
"Pre-war, is it?"
"Yes," I say. "If by war you mean the Norman invasion.

Garrett Carr

#36. Many writers from the suburbs of history, such as Ireland and Argentina, produced more original work than their counterparts in the United States; they still seem to.

Pankaj Mishra