Brendan Behan Quotes
When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
Quotes to Explore
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Often I look back and see that I had been many kinds of a fool-and that I had been happy in being this or that kind of fool.
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I wrote 'The River' practically trying to rip off every lick that James Taylor had, so it was neat to hear him sing those lyrics because that's who inspired you to write them.
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If you want to fight a war on drugs, sit down at your own kitchen table and talk to your own children.
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It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.
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A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
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Look, there ought to be politics in politics.
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If you'd have told me five years ago that I'd have done all this – two books, some television and everything – I'd panic, I'd be scared.
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It is every intelligent man's experience that evildoing recoils on the doer sooner or later.
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My eyelashes are divas, so they will like a mascara brand one week or for a month, and then they'll just stop working for it. I go back and forth between Maybelline and Cover Girl, and then I carry around a primer, too.
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I just lost interest in performing.
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Why are we building golf courses? Because we enjoy being outside, bringing man and nature together.
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Without trust, you have nothing: trust is so important to me.
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Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.
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It's when children are 15, 16 or 17 that they decide whether they want to be a doctor, an engineer, a politician or go to the Mars or moon. That is the time they start having a dream, and that's the time you can work on them. You can help them shape their dreams.
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Perfectionists are their own devils.
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You will seek not a near but a distant objective, and you will not be satisfied with what you may have done.
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Literary theory has become a parody of science, generating its own arcane jargon. In the process, tragically, it discourages love of literature for its own sake.
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Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
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I never show the back of my tongue. That is a Dutch expression.
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Life is a hurdle and you'll never clear it. Death is the end of the ride and you fear it.
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I will venture to affirm, that the three seasons wherein our corn has miscarried did no more contribute to our present misery, than one spoonful of water thrown upon a rat already drowned would contribute to his death; and that the present plentiful harvest, although it should be followed by a dozen ensuing, would no more restore us, than it would the rat aforesaid to put him near the fire, which might indeed warm his fur-coat, but never bring him back to life.
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I've seen some women who are not particularly attractive but they have an assurance, and there's something so attractive about someone who doesn't have to work so hard.
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When I came back to Dublin I was courtmartialed in my absence and sentenced to death in my absence, so I said they could shoot me in my absence.
