Top 100 Quotes About Irish
#1. Art is for [the Irish] inseparable from artifice: of that, the theatre is the home. Possibly, it was England made me a novelist.
Elizabeth Bowen
#2. Most of my jokes are racist - usually about the Irish.
Frank Carson
#3. I don't hold it against you that you turned out Irish, either. I wasn't there to make Englishmen of you, and so it's Irish you are, by default.
Neal Stephenson
#4. Because they were, like me, Irish Catholic, their nuptials were distinguished by mediocre food, free-flowing liquor, pre-Riverdance-style step dancing, and their own peculiar strains of Gaelic piety.
Maureen Corrigan
#5. My childhood was surrounded by trouble, illness, and my dad's alcoholism, but as I said, we just didn't have the time to be impressed by all those misfortunes. I have an idea that the Irish possess a built-in don't-give-a-damn that helps them through all the stress.
James Cagney
#6. An English army led by an Irish general: that might be a match for a French army led by an Italian general.
George Bernard Shaw
#7. 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
#8. Everyone wants to marry and Irish girl, they have the most beautiful babies.
Don J. Snyder
#9. The problem with being Irish ... is having 'Riverdance' on your back. It's a burden at times.
Roddy Doyle
#10. We may conceive an hope that the next generation will in tongue and heart and every way else become English; so as there will be no difference or distinction but the Irish sea betwixt us.
Sir John Davies
#11. God invented whiskey so the Irish wouldn't rule the world.
Jim Bishop
#12. Irish novelist John Banville has a creepy, introverted imagination.
Floyd Skloot
#13. When's the last time you walked by a pub in Dublin and heard Irish music? When's the last time you ordered a coffee and heard an Irish accent?
Michael Flatley
#14. I've always been fascinated with Ireland, especially Northern Ireland, having lived in London in the '80s when there was an Irish republican bombing campaign there.
John Gordon Sinclair
#15. I'm a product of my Irish culture, and I could no more lose that than I could my sense of identity.
Gabriel Byrne
#16. Roughly 1 in 6 Americans have Irish blood. I'd say it's probably safe to assume that the average Irish-American who only comes out on St. Patrick's Day has no idea of the sort of economic powerhouse Ireland has become.
Scott McClellan
#17. For the record, Irish," he informed her tightly, just in case she got the wrong idea, "I kneel to no one.
Karen Marie Moning
#19. The Irish mingled their Christianity with folk beliefs in fairies and changelings.
Ryan Hackney
#20. If it's well written, even an obscene book cannot be immoral.
John McGahern, Galway, October 6th 2003. Acclaimed as the most important Irish novellist since James Joyce.
John McGahern
#21. To make a career as an Irish actor, generally it's the case that you move to London. When you make that move, you do tend to stand out.
Aidan Turner
#22. It's not that I don't like American pop; I'm a huge admirer of it, but I think my roots came from a very English and Irish base. Is it all sort of totally non-American sounding, do you think?
Kate Bush
#23. Where would the Irish be without someone to be Irish at?
Elizabeth Bowen
#24. I was born in the island of Ireland. I have Irish traits in me - we don't all have the traits of what came from Scotland, there is the celtic factor ... and I am an Irishman because you cannot be an Ulsterman without being an Irishman
Ian Paisley
#25. The purpose of the University of Washington cannot be to produce black lawyers for blacks, Polish lawyers for Poles, Jewish lawyers for Jews, Irish lawyers for Irish. It should be to produce good lawyers for Americans and not to place First Amendment barriers against anyone.
William O. Douglas
#26. An elderly man called Keith Mislaid his set of false teeth - They'd been laid on a chair, He'd forgot they were there, Sat down, and was bitten beneath. Irish limerick
Janice Thompson
#27. The thing I like about Irish whiskey is that the more you drink the smoother it goes down. Of course that's probably true of antifreeze as well, but illusion is nearly all we have.
Robert B. Parker
#28. There's something about the Irish that is remarkable.
Fiona Shaw
#29. However it may be for others, for us of the Citizen Army there is but one ideal - an Ireland ruled, and owned, by Irish men and women, sovereign and independent from the centre to the sea, and flying its own flag outward over all the oceans.
James Connolly
#30. In Manhasset you were either Yankees or Mets, rich or poor, sober or drunk ... You were 'Gaelic' or 'garlic, as one schoolmate told me, and I couldn't admit, to him or myself, that I had both Irish and Italian ancestors.
J.R. Moehringer
#31. The Irish are the one race for which psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever ... because they already live in a dream world.
Sigmund Freud
#32. The distinction that Jews have themselves always made between Jews of German origin and Jews of East European origin is as stringent as that between Boston Brahmin and Boston lace-curtain Irish, though much finer.
Diana Trilling
#33. Germans found "American" (by which they often meant Irish) bars and their drinking customs both peculiar and unhealthy.
Donna R. Gabaccia
#34. Keep dreaming, Irish," she said dryly, though her breath was ragged.
"I will, but it remains to be seen whether they'll come true." The man was all confidence and skilled seduction.
Kate smirked. "Only an Irishman would say that."
"Only a beautiful, stubborn lass would ignore the truth.
Whitney K.E.
#35. I was never accepted into certain parts of New England society because my grandfather was an Irish barkeep.
John F. Kennedy
#36. I lived in the Republic of Ireland. I wrote a book about the North but as an outsider. The hatreds there were not mine. I never felt them. I liked how open in most ways Catalan nationalism was, compared to Irish nationalism. I disliked the violence and cruelty in Ireland.
Colm Toibin
#37. I was beginning to understand how the Irish mentality worked. The more foolish, illogical or surreal one's actions were perceived t be (and mine surely fell into one of these categories), the wider the arms of hospitality were opened in salutation.
Tony Hawks
#38. Damn it all, MacMurrough, are you telling me you are an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort?'
'If you mean am I Irish, the answer is yes.
Jamie O'Neill
#39. I love Ireland. I'll always be 100pc Irish. I get really excited when I go to Sligo; it's my home.
Shane Filan
#40. Irish rock star Bono has said, Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I've done a lot of stupid stuff.
Shane Claiborne
#41. As for the charm and innocence I hoped to find -- it exists, it really does, but consider what it's buried in. Racism. Misogyny and homophobia so absolute as to be nearly universal. Hatred of the Irish, the Italians, the Chinese -- not that many of them are seen in these parts
Robert Charles Wilson
#42. Well ironically my last three roles have all been a mother. One was a Canadian film where the baby was taken away because she is a drug addict, in Irish Jam I play a mother to a four year old. I think in the future I'll be able to handle the role with a lot more depth.
Anna Friel
#43. Awesome! I'd just bullied Jesus into doing a shot with me. Nobody would ever believe it, but I didn't care. We ordered the insanely expensive stuff, seventy-five dollars for a 1.75-ounce pour of premium Irish whiskey, because if you're doing a shot with Jesus, you don't buy him scotch.
Kevin Hearne
#44. 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
#46. We never get over our fathers, and we're not required to. (Irish Proverb)
Martin Sheen
#47. The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They're the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can't move up, and they're desperate not to move down.
Tracey Ullman
#49. Anakana Schofield is part of a new wave of wonderful Irish fiction-international in scope and electrically alive.
Colum McCann
#50. The six great gifts of an Irish girl are beauty, soft voice, sweet speech, wisdom, needlework, and chastity.
Theodore Roosevelt
#51. Being Irish-American myself, Irish-American material is readily at hand to me.
Alice McDermott
#52. No one would ever cast me as an aristocrat. I think the big thing about being an Irish artist is access to melancholy. Especially the American Irish. The availability of loss, some kind of pain, is an important part of who we are. I think my Irishness gave me that.
Brian Dennehy
#53. Being Irish was a big thing for me, particularly growing up in Chicago.
Lara Flynn Boyle
#54. Alice Oswald. With Hughes and Heaney gone, people are looking around for the best British and Irish poets. Oswald is one of our finest.
Tobias Hill
#55. I published my first book in 1982 - a collection of Irish folklore called Irish Folk & Fairy Tales. It is still in print today. My first young adult book was published a couple of years later, and I've been writing in both genres ever since.
Michael Scott
#56. developed Irish Alzheimer's over the years, which is to say that they failed to remember anything but their grudges.
Albie Cullen
#57. I am a proud product of Irish golf and the Golfing Union of Ireland and am hugely honoured to have come from very rich Irish sporting roots ... I am also a proud Ulsterman who grew up in Northern Ireland. That is my background and always will be.
Rory McIlroy
#58. Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce.
Norman Mailer
#59. If you stand back and look at it in a global sense you'll find this [Irish people in music] was happening everywhere. Which is just another example of a wave of artistic endeavour that changes. It reaches a certain point, learn from what its done and move on. We seemed to have picked up on that.
John Kinsella
#60. 'The Irish Duke' is a sequel to 'The Decadent Duke' about Lady Georgina Gordon who married the Duke of Bedford. 'The Irish Duke' tells the story of their daughter, Lady Louisa, who married James Hamilton, the powerful and wealthy Duke of Abercorn.
Virginia Henley
#61. An eight-mile drive over rain-washed Irish roads in the quick-falling dusk of autumn is an experience trying to the patience, even to the temper, of the average Saxon.
Katherine Cecil Thurston
#62. And he was more Irish in America than he'd ever been at home.
Rachel Cusk
#63. Gladstone .. spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question, ...
W.C. Sellar
#64. Perhaps our Irish friends should not so completely turn their backs on their historical dishes, no matter how many jokes they might have to endure.
Nick Clooney
#65. When I was growing up, I went to an Irish-Christian missionary school.
Deepak Chopra
#66. Stephen came on deck reflecting with satisfaction upon his sloth, now a parlour-boarder with the Irish Franciscans at Rio, and a secret drinker of the altar-wine.
Patrick O'Brian
#67. And I'm a Catholic, from an Irish Catholic family, and we know plenty of stuff about guilt.
Bob Gunton
#68. Out of the east on an Irish stallion came bounty hunter Dan His heart quickened and burdened by the need to get his man He found Pete peacefully fishing by the river, pulled his gun and got the drop He said, Pete, you think you've changed, but you have not.
Bruce Springsteen
#69. The Irish are hearty, the Scotch plausible, the French polite, the Germans good-natured, the Italians courtly, the Spaniards reserved and decorous - the English alone seem to exist in taking and giving offense.
William Hazlitt
#70. 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
#71. The British leadership has acknowledged that it only became possible to end the violence in North Ireland when it stopped thinking of the [Irish Republican Army] as "a terrorist organization" and began treating it as a political actor with genuine grievances that deserved to be addressed.
Richard A. Falk
#72. His mom lived in Long Island for ten years or so. God rest her soul. And- although, she's- wait- your mom's still- your mom's still alive. Your dad passed. God bless her soul.
Joe Biden, on the mother of Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen, who is very much alive, Washington, D.C., March 17, 2010
Joe Biden
#73. I go to Spain a lot, in winter, for a blast of sunlight to banish the blues brought on by the Irish greys and drizzle. I love the cities of the Spanish interior.
Kevin Barry
#74. Bill Clinton was one of the greatest presidents that we've seen. He was involved in the peace process in the very beginning, and he not only showed himself to be knowledgeable about Irish history and Irish-British relationships, but also he was very sympathetic to the idea of resolving conflict.
Martin McGuinness
#75. My mother is Irish, my father is black and Venezuelan, and me - I'm tan, I guess.
Mariah Carey
#76. Cause I'm Irish, and everyone remembers me.
Niall Horan
#77. Irish people will read anything as long as it's about them. That's what I think. We are our own greatest subject and though we've gone and looked elsewhere about the world we have found that there are just no people, no subject as fascinating as We Ourselves.
Niall Williams
#78. The Irish are a fair people: They never speak well of one another.
Samuel Johnson
#79. 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.
John Hume
#80. Oh, the Irish were building the railroads down through Mexico, through Chihuahua. They finished the railroads when they finished out in the West Coast, and they went down and put the trains into Mexico.
Anthony Quinn
#81. I've got that Irish thing going on. Lots of Irish in my background.
Jodie Foster
#82. My dad was a very funny man - he's the one who taught me life would be awfully hard without humor! I'm sure his Irish wit in some way influenced my decision to become an actress.
Joan Cusack
#83. If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.
Brendan Behan
#84. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter.
Charles Dickens
#85. I come as one package deal. An Irish lesbian who wakes up every day and goes to work. And I don't spend a lot of time thinking about being 'the first this' or 'the first that' because it would take up space in my brain.
Christine Quinn
#86. In 2016, let us all join the Rising, and the only final message is this very clear: Up the Rebels. Up a sovereign and independent Irish republic.
Martin McGuinness
#87. Magnus shrugged. He also made inappropriate amorous advances to a startled grandmotherly sort selling flowers, an Irish wolfhound, and innocent hat stand in a dwelling he broke into, and myself.
Cassandra Clare
#88. 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
#89. I wrote a script. I actually enjoyed writing it more than acting. It's about the Irish rebellion of 1920, which is a fascinating period and place for me.
Tom Berenger
#90. The Irish job was something that had to be sorted out.
Jack Charlton
#91. That's the Irish all over
they treat a joke as a serious thing and a serious thing as a joke.
Sean O'Casey
#92. He had been thinking of how landscape moulds a language. It was impossible to imagine these hills giving forth anything but the soft syllables of Irish, just as only certain forms of German could be spoken on the high crags of Europe; or Dutch in the muddy, guttural, phlegmish lowlands.
Alexander McCall Smith
#93. The Irish ... are full of the fear of the Lord and the joy of living, and they don't know how to combine the two, but they'll sure have a good time trying.
Mercedes McCambridge
#94. I spent my entire Irish Catholic youth in a constant state of guilt over imaginary sins. I learned that nothing is a sin as long as you don't take pleasure from it.
Terry Wogan
#95. Most of the first voluntary Irish immigrants came from Ulster in the north of Ireland. These immigrants were generally, although not exclusively, Protestants. They were known as "Scotch-Irish" or "Scots Irish,
Ryan Hackney
#96. Supreme egotism and utter seriousness are necessary for the greatest accomplishment, and these the Irish find hard to sustain; at some point, the instinct to see life in a comic light becomes irresistible, and ambition falls before it
William V. Shannon
#97. Taste it and you will get a desire for it.
Irish Proverb
Dorien Kelly
#98. We do know for sure that good Irish Catholics followed their faith in the direction of inclusion, compassion, equality, justice, and a host of other Catholic values when they voted with the majority despite some clergymen's efforts to lead them astray.
Mary E. Hunt
#99. Immigrants have always come into the country with low levels of education. Whether it's the Irish or Italian or Polish, here is the land of opportunity. It's where people come in at the bottom and build themselves up. To try to bring in people who have already made it is un-American.
Lionel Sosa
#100. Westlife earnt millions. We were on the 'Irish Times' Rich List. And then ... I'm not!
Shane Filan
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