Irish Journalist Quotes

William Howard Russell
Colum McCann

Even the distribution of rations leaves much to be desired; the fatigue party, well-intentioned and sympathetic though it be, often finds itself short of provisions.

All we have to face in the future is what has happened in the past. It is unbearable.

On this I ponder Where'er I wander, And thus grow fonder, Sweet Cork, of thee, - With thy bells of Shandon, That sound so grand on The pleasant waters Of the river Lee.

The tragedy of Northern Ireland is that it is now a society in which the dead console the living.

People say you're born innocent, but it's not true. You inherit all kinds of things that you can do nothing about. You inherit your identity, your history, like a birthmark that you can't wash off.... We are born with our heads turned back, but my mother says we have to face into the future now. You have to earn your own innocence, she says. You have to grow up and become innocent.

Art is a hideously painful business, you know. Pity me! Or at least buy me a drink.

The Russians dashed on towards that thin redline streak tipped with a line of steel.

William Howard Russell
William Howard Russell
Charles Haughey was undoubtedly a great statesman... By far the most gifted politician of his generation,
he squandered his opportunities for greatness on luxuriant rhetoric and luxurious living.

The automatic assumption that everything a unionist does is wrong is not good for us. Like, how could everything that unionists do be wrong? I mean, they're not a special people. They're not a kind of special bad people.

If there were nothing else, reading would—obviously—be worth living for.

A man who will misuse an apostrophe is capable of anything.

One good reason for the popularity of "reductionism" among the philosophical outposts of the Western Establishment is that it can be, and is, used as a device for trying to take the wind, so to speak, out of the sails of Marxism.... In essence reductionism is a kind of anti-Marxist caricature of Marxist determinism. It is what anti-Marxists pretend that Marxist determinism is.

An Englishman of the strongest type moulded for an Irish purpose.
Of Charles Stewart parnell

It is an engaging problem in ethics whether, if you have been lent a cottage, you have the right to feed the mice.

Young Rody MacCorley goes to die
On the Bridge of Toome today.

Stupidity and malevolence are the twin rulers of human destiny and there is no hope for the future save in the soul of man, and even there high purpose is fitful and often dwarfed by animal necessities.

Life must pass through difficulty in order to achieve any modicum of beauty.

Colum McCann
Colum McCann