Dervla Murphy Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

Apartheid still hangs in the air like a poisonous cloud left over from chemical warfare.

Dervla Murphy
Poverty denotes a lack of necessities and simplicity a lack of needs.

Dervla Murphy
That was, I think, the most magical dawn I have ever attended. But when I remarked to Rachel that one wet night was a small price to pay for such an experience she merely grunted and went on wringing out her flea-bag. Perhaps at fourteen one's aesthetic sensibilities are still latent.

Dervla Murphy
Buying a bicycle is a momentous event, akin to marriage: you are acquiring a partner.

Dervla Murphy
Sunnis consider Shias a pack of unwholesome fanatics and Shias consider Sunnis a gang of lukewarm no-goods — there's nothing like religion for spreading brotherly love!

Dervla Murphy
This is a city of absolute enchantment in the literal sense of the word. It loosens all the bonds binding the traveller to his own age and sets him free to live in a past that is vital and crude but never ugly. Herat is as old as history and as moving as a great epic poem - if Afghanistan had nothing else it would have been worth coming to experience this.

Dervla Murphy
Hatred, however apparently justifiable, excusable or inevitable, always damages the hater.

Dervla Murphy
Is this something else our age does - on the one hand make communication easier than ever before, while on the other hand widening the gulf between those who are 'developed' and those who are not?

Dervla Murphy
The more I see of life in these 'undeveloped countries' and of the methods adopted to 'improve' them, the more depressed I become. It seems criminal that the backwardness of a country like Afghanistan should be used as an excuse for America and Russia to have a tug-of-war for possession.

Dervla Murphy
With our mad lust for Uniformity and a Higher Standard of Living and Expanding Markets, we go to a country like Afghanistan and cruelly try to jerk her forward two thousand years in two decades, giving no thought to the profound shock this must be to her national psychology.

Dervla Murphy
Without evading the grimness of life in much of modern Africa, one can recognize that this continent is not yet sick as our continent is sick. Most Africans remain plugged into reality. In contrast we have become disconnected from it, reduced to compulsively consuming units, taught to worship 'economic growth' - the ultimate unreality in a finite world.

Dervla Murphy