Irish Quotes
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We play our Irish songs a bit more loosely.
Caroline Corr
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It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.
Douglas Hyde
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My old manager of the Irish National Theatre said 'Don't worry about being a star, just worry about being a working actor. Just keep working.' I think that's really good advice.
Colm Meaney
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I've always loved movies, so I tried to get into an acting school. I saw an ad for the Oscar school on the back of 'The Irish Times,' and I went along for an audition, very pragmatically, to see if I could do it or not.
Liam Cunningham
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Instead of deluding public opinion with a notion that a sufficient application of force will provide a remedy, a wiser course would be to set about taking such steps as may be the means of recovering that consent without which society in Ireland cannot exist...an offer should be made to the Irish conceived on the most generous lines.
Edward Wood, 1st Earl of Halifax
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The novel space is a pure space. I'm nobody once I go into that room. I'm not gay, I'm not bald, I'm not Irish. I'm not anybody. I'm nobody. I'm the guy telling the story, and the only person that matters is the person reading that story, the target. It's to get that person to feel what I'm trying to dramatize.
Colm Toibin
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There are a few Irish writers who have a very strong influence on me, especially on the 'Take Me to Church' EP.
Andrew Hozier-Byrne
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The way I see it is that all the ol' guff about being Irish is a kind of nonsense. I mean, I couldn't be anything else no matter what I tried to be. I couldn't be Chinese or Japanese.
John McGahern
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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
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I was born in Northern Ireland, also known as Ulster, and I'm Scots-Irish, therefore.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
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When I was 19, I thought I wanted to be an English civil servant. It was the most exotic thing at the time - can you imagine, in the middle of the IRA bombing campaigns? I saw an ad inviting Irish applicants for an induction course, so I signed up.
Colm Toibin
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My feet always danced to Irish traditional music, but I was very glad to get out of the North of Ireland in the mid-Seventies when it was really closed and tight and relentlessly unforgiving.
Ciaran Hinds
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I had moments with my father that were exquisite - the stories he told me about Cuchulain, the mythological Irish warrior, are still magical to me.
Frank McCourt
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The British don't runaway from terrorism. We have had 30-odd years of terrorism in our own country from the Irish Republican Army. We're used to it.
John Major
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Most of my jokes are racist - usually about the Irish.
Frank Carson
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In these days of our new materialistic Irish state, poetry will have a harder, less picturesque task. But the loss of Yeats and all that boundless activity, in a country where the mind is feared and avoided, leaves a silence which it is painful to contemplate.
Austin Clarke
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If Britain votes to leave the European Union, then that could have huge implications for the entire island of Ireland and, given all the predictions, would run counter to the democratic wishes of the Irish people.
Martin McGuinness
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A huge part of Irish dance is balance, which is so good for any kind of combat - just being aware of your body.
Annie Wersching
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Yeats regarded his work as the close of an epoch, and the least of his later lyrics brings the sense of a great occasion. English critics have tried to claim him for their tradition, but, heard closely, his later music has that tremulous lyrical undertone which can be found in the Anglo-Irish eloquence of the eighteenth century.
Austin Clarke
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Hispanics have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Come to that, the Irish and Italians and Jews also have a long tradition of defiance against authority. Thinking it over, everybody has a long tradition of defiance against authority. (Except the Germans, of course.)
Donald E. Westlake
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No, young man. No jokes here. There's a time and place. When you say something in class they take you seriously. You're the teacher. You say you went out with a sheep and they’re going to swallow every word. They don’t know the mating habits of the Irish.
Frank McCourt
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The Irish are trying to be American, that's all it is. Everything American does Ireland has to do as well. Next thing you know, the Irish are going to start saying 'aluminum', and that'll be the last straw as far as I'm concerned. If that happens, I'm not going back! Everyone's got their own reasons to dislike Americans, 'aluminum' is top of my fucking list, ladies and gentleman. Aluminum cans, aluminum – what the fuck's aluminum foil? Honestly! Everyone knows it's pronounced 'tin'!
Ed Byrne
