History Ireland Quotes

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

The History of Ireland in two words: Ah well.

The Invasion by the Vikings: Ah well.

The Invasion by the Normans. The Flight of the Earls, Mr Oliver Cromwell. Daniel O'Connell, Robert Emmett, The Famine, Charles Stewart Parnell, Easter Rising, Michael Collins, Éamon De Valera, Éamon De Valera again (Dear Germany, so sorry to learn of the death of your Mr Hitler), Éamon De Valera again, the Troubles, the Tribunals, the Fianna Fáil Party, The Church, the Banks, the eight hundred years of rain: Ah well.

In the Aeneid Virgil tells it as Sunt lacrimae rerum, which in Robert Fitzgerald's translation means 'They weep for how the world goes', which is more eloquent than Ah well but means the same thing. ~ Niall Williams

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

When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland's capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were "the boys in the band"? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that had produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we're teachers, missionaries. ~ Josephine Hart

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

History is the enemy of memory. ~ Richard White

[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

What do we do if we come across trouble, sir?' Cahill asked, slapping at a fly. 'As much as I enjoy giving the rebel turds a walloping, it should be down to the Militia to keep the buggers in check.'
'They are doing their job,' Mullone said, glancing at a free-standing Celtic Cross that had once been a prominent feature beside the road, but was now strangled with weeds, besieged with dark moss and deeply pitted with age.
'If you call plundering, fighting and torture work, sir.'
'You don't have much faith in the peace talks then, Seán?'
'No, sir. There's more chance of me taking holy orders and becoming the Pope than there is of peace,' Cahill replied. 'The negotiations that spout from the politicians mouths are nothing but wet farts.'

-from Liberty or Death ~ David Cook

I am a war man in the day of war, but I am a peace man in the day of peace. ~ Michael Collins

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

That remains part of the problem - that we don't know the unpleasant aspects of American history...and therefore we don't learn the lesson those chapters have to teach us. So we repeat them over and over again. ~ George Takei

The history of Europe before the Conquest is sufficient proof that the Europeans did not have to cross the oceans to find the will to exterminate those standing in their way. ~ Silvia Federici

Europe is standing on the brink of the greatest tragedy in the history of the human race: a new world war, that may involve the doom of our entire civilisation. ~ Vidkun Quisling

At St. John's College, Annapolis, where Robert Hutchins' educational views have been most successfully practiced, they make, it is true, a great hubbub about science. The school's catalog boasts that more mathematics and laboratory work are required than at any other college, and there is even a pretentious listing of all pieces of apparatus used by the student, down to such items as compass, calipers, and ruler. But so heavy is the emphasis on highlights in the past history of science, that little time is left for acquiring a solid grasp of current scientific opinion. ~ Martin Gardner

The attempt to apply rational arithmetic to a problem in geometry resulted in the first crisis in the history of mathematics. The two relatively simple problems
the determination of the diagonal of a square and that of the circumference of a circle
revealed the existence of new mathematical beings for which no place could be found within the rational domain. ~ David Van Dantzig

Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire. ~ Noam Chomsky

The new approach to health care will feature the healing power of story. In the clear understanding that finding meaning in any life passage may be at the heart of healing, our healers -declared or undeclared - will help people use the power of dreaming to move beyond personal history into a bigger story that contains the juice and sense of purpose to get them through. ~ Robert Moss

Men are created from the molds of new born human babies, and the human demon does not cross that route ever; both, however, share the biological history of the human body. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

I live alone," Knud said, "and I work alone, but I am never truly alone. I do my ancestor's work. I live the entire history of my country and people. ~ Maureen Johnson

Mistakes from our collective past are like any other: they require intervention--a remedy--to correct. They don't erase themselves over time. ~ Jonathan R. Miller

I think we learn more from those times in our history where we stumbled as a democracy than we learn from the glorious chapters. ~ George Takei

You need to be careful of people who tell you that adventure exists at the next turn--because it turns out that they are not really walking into a story, but running away from a history that chases them throughout time. ~ Christopher Herz

In all their wars against the French they [the Americans] never showed such conduct, attention and perseverance as they do now. ~ Thomas Gage

No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason, and to fill with reverence for divinity the godless and the ungodly. ~ Richard Hakluyt

If England was first and foremost a trading nation this was because its temperate climate and fertile soils, particularly in the south and east, allowed it to produce a surplus to sell. ~ Juliet Barker

Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary? ~ Carl Sagan

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any interest in knowing her. I have no need for the past, I thought, like a child. I did not consider that the past might have a need for me.
What kind of letter? my grandmother asked.
I told her to write whatever she wanted to write.
You want a letter from me? she asked.
I told her yes.
Oh, God bless you, she said.
The letter she gave me was sixty-seven pages long. It was the story of her life. She made my request into her own. Listen to me. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

To understand the future course of this war, one need only look at the history of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Like those two manufactured "wars", this one will be never-ending, freedom-destroying, counterproductive, and ultimately understood to have caused far more damage than the supposed threat it was aimed at ever could have. ~ Ramez Naam

This new situation, in which "humanity" has in effect assumed the role formerly ascribed to nature or history, would mean in this context that the right to have rights, or the right of every individual to belong to humanity, should be guaranteed by humanity itself. It is by no means certain whether this is possible. For, contrary to the best-intentioned humanitarian attempts to obtain new declarations of human rights from international organizations, it should be understood that this idea transcends the present sphere of international law which still operates in terms of reciprocal agreements and treaties between sovereign states; and, for the time being, a sphere that is above the nation does not exist. Furthermore, this dilemma would by no means be eliminated by the establishment of a "world government." Such a world government is indeed within the realm of possibility, but one may suspect that in reality it might differ considerably from the version promoted by idealistic-minded organizations. The crimes against human rights, which have become a specialty of totalitarian regimes, can always be justified by the pretext that right is equivalent to being good or useful for the whole in distinction to its parts. (Hitler's motto that "Right is what is good for the German people" is only the vulgarized form of a conception of law which can be found everywhere and which in practice will remain effectual only so long as older traditions that are still effective in the constitution ~ Hannah Arendt

To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty. ~ Sally Mann

Goethe (I don't know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in my critical moments) said: "Man must experience his own destiny" - not a factual destiny forced on him by History, but the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. At the time of the French Revolution and also of the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. He could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the battlefield, he knew that what was then being consummated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a "personal destiny;" there are only statistical probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal destiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictatorship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgment on a society. This is why I must go somewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for me to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece of data in a category. ~ Sandor Marai

The sex drive is one of the most fundamental human urges, and throughout history, there have been laws regulating what is considered acceptable sexual behavior. In the past century, the law has had trouble keeping up with changing social and moral standards. ~ Terry Gross

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen. ~ Ken Kesey

As you travel through the Middle East what keeps on striking home to me is how similar everyone is, and yet the degree to which we can find differences to fight wars over. It requires a great deal of empathy, I think, between various sides to overcome this history and live in peace. ~ Barack Obama

The basis of the Impossible Standard is that no matter how hard you try you can't ever be good enough. The Standard raises as you do.
Ruth Swain in History of the Rain ~ Niall Williams

Music is part of history, and our history has lessons that cannot be separated from our greatest music. ~ Mstislav Rostropovich

History is the story of events, with praise or blame. ~ Cotton Mather

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps. ~ James W. Loewen

It was my father who had taught me to love books for themselves, the smell of the vellum and paper, the rare authority of the pages. "Here, do you see this marvelous book, the skins of 182 sheep," he once pronounced as he slapped his hand down on the stamped leather cover boards. "The book is a flock, a jewel, a cemetery, a lantern, a garden, a piss pot; pigments ground of precious minerals, charred bone, lamp soot, rare plants and insects. Pigments formed at the corrosion of copper plates suspended above urine. ~ Regina O'Melveny

My shamans have read the sands. They have learned much of your future. (...)'

Gamet was scowling. 'I do not wish to offend, Warchief, but I hold little faith in divination. No mortal - no god - can say we are doomed, or destined. The future remains unknown, the one thing we cannot force a pattern upon.'

(...)

'Do you not see patterns in history, Fist? Are you blind to the cycles we all suffer through? Look upon this desert, this wasteland you cross. Yours is not the first empire that would claim it. And what of the tribes? Before the Khundryl, before the Kherahn Dhobri and the Tregyn, there were the Sanid, and the Oruth, and before them there were others whose names have vanished. Look upon the ruined cities, the old roads. The past is all patterns, and those patterns remain beneath our feet, even as the stars above reveal their own patterns - for the stars we gaze upon each night are naught but an illusion from the past.' He raised the jug again and studied it for a moment. 'Thus, the past lies beneath and above the present, Fist. This is the truth my shamans embrace, the bones upon which the future clings like muscle. ~ Steven Erikson

When whistleblowers come forward, we need to fight for them, so others will be encouraged. When they are gagged, we must be their voice. When they are hunted, we must be their shield. When they are locked away, we must free them. Giving us the truth is not a crime. This is our data, our information, our history. We must fight to own it. ~ Sara Harrison

Roosevelt gazed around the library. A glint in his spectacles betrayed displeasure. Loeb came up inquiringly, and there was a whispered conversation in which the words newspapermen and sufficient room were audible. Hurrying outside, Loeb returned with two dozen delighted scribes. They proceeded to report the subsequent ceremony with a wealth of detail unmatched in the history of presidential inaugurations. ~ Edmund Morris

It would strike me as ridiculous to want to doubt the existence of Napoleon; but if someone doubted the existence of the earth 150years ago, perhaps I should be more willing to listen, for now he is doubting our whole system of evidence. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

In Him (God), history and prophecy are one and the same. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

Beauty comes from the inside. ~ Kathy Ireland

Ireland, Ireland. That cloud in the west, that coming storm. ~ William E. Gladstone

Television has given Pakistan a truly open national forum for the first time in its history. Ideas are debated, leaders are assessed and criticised, and a nation of 170 million people is finally discovering, together, what it thinks. ~ Mohsin Hamid

History can't tell us. Each generation must define itself. ~ Geoffrey Ward

A clear lesson of history is that a 'sine qua non' for sustained economic recovery following a financial crisis is a thoroughgoing repair of the financial system. ~ Janet Yellen

I grew up here, and it's always been a very diverse community. So for people to come out and say that there's some long-standing anger or there's a history of racial tension is absolutely ridiculous. There's not a black-white divide in Ferguson. ~ James Knowles III

Martin Luther King's 1963 'I have a dream' speech was a thrilling milestone in the civil rights movement, so enduring that we tend to attribute its searing power to a kind of magic. But Gary Younge's meditative retrospection on its significance reminds us of all the micro-moments of transformation behind the scenes
the thought and preparation, vision and revision
whose currency fed that magnificent lightning bolt in history. ~ Patricia J. Williams

Well I teach in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. So that's my primary work. I lecture on various campuses and in various communities across the country and other parts of the world. ~ Angela Davis

THE FACE OF HISTORY is not in the well-preserved faces of the famous, but in the remains of those who lived in the moment ~ Gerry Burnie

The pie-cook and the pie-consumer are both lucky if the smell of the pie 'sells' not only its desirability as biological fuel but also remembrance of pies past. ~ Janet Clarkson