Irish Famine Quotes

When the British Empire turned their back on millions of Irish dying during the Great Famine, Muslim nations sent food relief. ~ Fuad Alakbarov

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

Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years. ~ Amartya Sen

The typical Irish peasant ate about 10 pounds of potatoes each day and soon towered in physical size over their rural English equivalents who mainly ate bread. ~ Rashers Tierney

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn't do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. ~ Thomas Keneally

Plays by people like Martin McDonagh and Brian Friel attract huge audiences, not because they're Irish, but because they're brilliant plays. ~ Garry Hynes

Sir Patrick Rackrent lived and died a monument of old Irish hospitality. ~ Maria Edgeworth

Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself. Memory is, achingly, the only relation we can have with the dead. So the belief that remembering is an ethical act is deep in our natures as humans, who know we are going to die, and who mourn those who in the normal course of things die before us - grandparents, parents, teachers, and older friends. Heartlessness and amnesia seem to go together. But history gives contradictory signals about the value of remembering in the much longer span of a collective history. There is simply too much injustice in the world. And too much remembering (of ancient grievances: Serbs, Irish) embitters. To make peace is to forget. To reconcile, it is necessary that memory be faulty and limited. If the goal is having some space in which to live one's own life, then it is desirable that the account of specific injustices dissolve into a more general understanding that human beings everywhere do terrible things to one another. * * * P ~ Susan Sontag

My parents spent an awful lot of money sending me to the best possible schools, and I came out of my exams and thought, 'I don't really want to do a degree.' I did philosophy with the Jesuits for about a year, and then I joined a bank. While I was there, I saw an ad in an Irish paper for radio announcers. ~ Terry Wogan

We have to be concerned about the gun killing that people who are Americans, who are Irish, and who are English, who are all around the country. ~ Dalia Mogahed

I knew lots of Irish ladies in my life who would say daft things and then would just say something incredibly truthful in a very simple way with simple language - a few well chosen words that would take an intellectual five minutes to express. I like that. ~ Steve Coogan

I'm most comfortable with the Southern dialects, really. It's easy, for example, for me to do Irish because we've got Irish heritage where I come from. ~ Brad Pitt

Religion is based on the insistence that over and above all is a purpose and a guiding hand that is beneficent and kind, and would not leave a hair unnumbered or let a sparrow fall unnoticed to the ground. Those who cherish such hallucinations forget that the all-loving power is inflicting tuberculosis, cancer, famine, and pestilence on the trusting, simple sons of men. ~ Clarence Darrow

Bridezellia was like General Patton she had an Operations Room, HQ established in her sitting room. Wall charts, to do lists, pictures, contact lists, mood charts, a calendar, list of dates and jobs were marked off with daily duties in her thick black diary. Her second in command was Saoirse, her local wedding planner. Nothing was going to be left to chance and nobody was going to ruin her prefect day. No expense was to be spared and fools were not suffered gladly. Raised voices were constantly heard in her phone calls to suppliers. Her personality changed and she became a hot head, losing her patience easily. Nobody entered her sitting room, the twilight zone without an invitation ~ Annette J. Dunlea

The Greenpeace booth at all the rock and roll shows nowadays are akin to the old sorcerers who used to stand in the middle of villages warning of danger, 'When night wolf swallows mother moon, there will be great famine.' ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Unless you truly feel the pain and sufferings of the people and living beings in flood, famine, poverty, disease, exploitation, and hunger – you cannot grow spiritually, scientifically, politically, and socially. ~ Amit Ray

If there is a vote in Britain to leave the E.U. there is a democratic imperative to provide Irish citizens with the right to vote in a border poll to end partition and retain a role in the E.U. ~ Martin McGuinness

I lived in a plenty tough neighborhood. When somebody called me a 'dirty little Guinea', there was only one thing to do-break his head. When I got older, I realized that you shouldn't do it that way. I realized that you've got to do it through education. Children are not to blame. It is the parents. How can a child know whether his playmate is an Italian, a Jew or Irish, unless the parents have discussed it in the privacy of their homes. ~ Frank Sinatra

I caddied - more accurately, I drove the golf cart - for Father O'Leary and his friends throughout most of the summer of that year. I was a good caddie because I saw nothing when they passed the bottle of whiskey and turned a deaf ear to yet another colorful reinvention of the words "motherless son of a bitch from hell" when the golf ball betrayed them. ~ John William Tuohy

I'm Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish music, but stayed away from the old country till I was over 40. I just couldn't own being Irish. ~ John Patrick Shanley

The disaster at the Chernobyl plant, along with the war in Afghanistan and the cruise-missile question, is generally seen today as the start of the decline of the Soviet Union. Just as the great famine of 1891 had mercilessly laid bare the failure of czarism, almost a century later Chernobyl clearly showed how divided, rigid and rotten the Soviet regime had become. The principal policy instruments, secrecy and repression, no longer worked in a modern world with its accompanying means of communication. The credibility of the party leadership sank to the point at which it could sink no further. In the early hours of 26 April, 1986, two explosions took place in one of the four reactors at the giant nuclear complex. It was an accident of the kind scientists and environmental activists had been warning about for years, particularly because of its effects: a monstrous emission of iodine-131 and caesium-137. Huge radioactive clouds drifted across half of Europe: ~ Geert Mak

She viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats to her furniture. ~ Arundhati Roy

Look, just because I'm an angry, repressed, Irish-Catholic feminist doesn't mean I hate everything. I only hate youth, beauty, the human body, nature, technological change, popular culture, and democracy. Oh, and I forgot to mention sex. And sports. And Andy Warhol. But other than that, I'm cool with whatever the kids are into. Really! ~ Mary Gordon

An Irish surgeon, Denis Burkitt, discovered an aggressive form of lymphoma - now called Burkitt's lymphoma - ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

Short-term amnesia is not the worst affliction if you have an Irish flair for the sauce. ~ Norman Mailer

The rule for hospitality and Irish "help," is, to have the same dinner every day throughout the year. At last, Mrs. O'Shaughnessylearns to cook it to a nicety, the host learns to carve it, and the guests are well served. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

her real depths are Irish and romantic and illogical ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

I am, of course, directly descended from Brian Boru, the last king of Ireland, a fact certified by my mother and therefore beyond dispute. But as everybody else with a drop of Irish blood in his carcass is also a guaranteed descendant of the old billy goat, I am not overly arrogant because of this royal strain. ~ Preston Sturges

If you could drink dreams like the Irish streams
Then the world would be high as the mountain of morn
In the Pool they told us the story
How the English divided the land ... ~ John Lennon

Let any one who is acquainted with what multitudes of people get their daily bread in this city by their labour, whether artificers or meer workmen - I say, let any man consider what must be the miserable condition of this town if, on a sudden, they should all be turned out of employment, that labour should cease, and wages for work be no more.

This was the case with us at that time; and had not the sums of money contributed in charity by well-disposed people of every kind, as well as abroad as at home, been prodigiously great, it had not been in the power of the Lord Mayor and sheriffs to have kept the publick peace. Nor were they without apprehensions, as it was, that desperation should push the people upon tumults and cause them to rifle the houses of rich men and plunder the markets of provisions; in which case the country people, who brought provisions very freely and boldly to town, would have been terrified from coming any more, and the town would have sunk under an unavoidable famine. ~ Daniel Defoe

All I knew about Ethiopia was from a few records that I like, as well as what I read about the famine. But you get there and it's another world. It's filled with art and music and poetry and intellectuals and writers - all kinds of people. ~ Flea

The Irish landowner, partly from laziness but also from an indifferent delicacy, does not interfere in the lives of the people round. Sport and death are the two great socializing factors in Ireland, but these cannot operate the whole time: on the whole, the landowner leaves his tenants and work-people to make their own mistakes, while he makes his. ~ Elizabeth Bowen

There's a guy at the other end of the bar who looks up at us just as I'm taking my seat, and I assume this is Harrison. He looks to be in his late twenties, with a head full of curly, red hair. The combination of his fair skin and the fact that there are four-leaf clovers on almost every sign in this place makes me wonder if he's Irish or if he just wishes he were. ~ Colleen Hoover

My father was a Norwegian tenor and my mother a New York Irish librarian. ~ David Johansen

What was taken by outsiders to be slackness, slovenliness or even generosity was in fact a full recognition of the legitimacy of forces other than good ones. They did not believe doctors could heal
for them, none ever had done so. They did not believe death was accidental
life might be, but death was deliberate. They did not believe Nature was ever askew
only inconvenient. Plague and drought were as 'natural' as springtime. If milk could curdle, God knows robins could fall. The purpose of evil was to survive it and they determined (without ever knowing they had made up their minds to do it) to survive floods, white people, tuberculosis, famine and ignorance. They knew anger well but not despair, and they didn't stone sinners for the same reason they didn't commit suicide
it was beneath them. ~ Toni Morrison

This was especially true of the Irish in Ireland in relation to the British, who for centuries treated them as an inferior race. Note, however, that their skin color was indistinguishable from that of those considered to be "white". If anything, the skin of most people of Irish descent is "fairer" than that of others of European heritage. But their actual complexion didn't matter, because the dominant racial group has the cultural authority to define the boundaries around "white" as it chooses. ~ Allan G. Johnson

We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks. ~ Oscar Wilde

We survive. We're Irish. We have the souls of poets. We love our misery, we delight in the beauty of strange places and dark places in our hearts. ~ Eilis Flynn

It was impossible for me to believe that conditions in Europe could be worse than they were in the Polish section of Chicago, and in many Italian and Irish tenements, or that any workshops could be worse than some of those I had seen in our foreign quarters. ~ Alice Hamilton

Tossing it to a corner, he turns back to take my hand. And I'm facing the chest that I've not been able to dislodge from my brain for weeks. The one that instantly makes my breath hitch. The one that I've never had a chance to stare at so blatantly while sober. And I do stare now. Like a deer caught in headlights, I can't seem to turn away as I take in all the ridges and curves.
"What does that mean?" I ask, jutting my chin toward the inked symbol over his heart. Ashton doesn't answer. He avoids the question completely by sliding his thumb across my bottom lip.
"You have a bit of drool there, ~ K.A. Tucker

When I'm lying drunk at an airport the press call me Irish ... but when I win an Oscar, I'm classified as British. ~ Brenda Fricker

I showed my appreciation of my native land in the usual Irish way: by getting out of it as soon as I possibly could. ~ George Bernard Shaw

I gave away the Irish dancing, which is pivotal. It's just so silly and fun and nice to do because it kind of lifts the energy for us, right at the point where the energy could start to take a nose dive. ~ Katherine Shindle

A man with an Irish accent could sound wise and poetic and interesting even when he wasn't. ~ Kate Atkinson

I tried to find a word for it in my thesaurus, but there isn't one. At least, not one that doesn't belittle the plight of POWs and victims of famine. I guess we can just call it beyond suck. -Lulu Dark ~ Bennett Madison

Integrate at least three of these items into your daily diet to be sure you are eating plenty of whole food. 1. Beans - all kinds: black beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, black-eyed peas, lentils 2. Greens - spinach, kale, chards, beet tops, fennel tops 3. Sweet potatoes - don't confuse with yams. 4. Nuts - all kinds: almonds, peanuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts, cashews 5. Olive oil - green, extra-virgin is usually the best. Note that olive oil decomposes quickly, so buy no more than a month's supply at a time. 6. Oats - slow-cook or Irish steel-cut are best. 7. Barley - either in soups, as a hot cereal, or ~ Dan Buettner