Charles Stewart Parnell

"Why should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragment of England, as he had heard an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer call it some time ago. Ireland was not a geographical fragment, but a nation."

"The law gave those landlords extensive power at the present time, and unless they went in for a revolution he confessed he did not see how they were going to bring about a radical reform of the system of land tenure in this country."

"You can never have civil liberty so long as strangers and Englishmen make your laws and so long as the occupiers of the soil own not an inch of it."

"[Y]ou have an expenditure of five or six millions of pounds sterling—nearly all of it paid by the English taxpayers, and all for the purpose of screwing rack-rents out of the Irish tenants. I am very sure that that sort of thing will not be allowed to go on. Would not it be a very wise thing for the Irish landlords to recognize the situation in time, to see that if they do not be reasonable they will be chucked overboard altogether?"

"Fellow citizens:The hour to try your souls and to redeem your pledges has arrived."

"Stand together in face of the brutal, cowardly enemies of your race!"

"Bring English tyranny to its knees."

"Pay no rent under any pretext!"

"The government, with its bayonets, will learn in a single Winter how powerless are armed forces against the will of a united determined, and self-reliant nation."

"Do what is beyond your strength even should you fail sometimes."

"Without the help of the people our exertions would be as nothing."

"No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation."

"No man has the right to say to his country "Thus far shalt thou go and no further"."

"While we leave those things to time, circumstances and the future, we must each one of us resolve in our own hearts that we shall at all times do everything which within us lies to obtain Ireland the fullest measure of her rights."

"I would not have taken off my coat and gone to work had I not known that we were laying the foundations by this movement for the recovery of our legislative independence."

"Richard Barry O'Brien: Every Irish Nationalist would go for separation if he thought he could get it; we are all Home Rulers because we do not believe separation is possible. Charles Stewart Parnell: I have never gone for separation. I never said I would. The physical force men understand my position very well. I made it clear to them that I would be satisfied with a Parliament, and that I believed in our constitutional movement; but I also said that if our constitutional movement failed, I could not then stand in the way of any man who wished to go further and to try other means. That was the position I always took up. I have never changed, and I still believe in our constitutional movement. I believe that with our own Parliament, if England does not meddle, we can build up our country."

"Parnell's death is as unexpected as most of his proceedings. I don't think you and I ever quite agreed in our estimate of him. I still regard him—measured by his opportunities and his achievements—as one of the half-dozen great men of action of this century. Napoleon stands by himself; he has in our time—in many respects in all time—neither equal nor second. But the only others of this age that I would rank higher than Parnell are Abraham Lincoln, Bismarck, and (perhaps) Cavour. Of course you understand that I am not speaking of the goodness (in any of the cases) of the result, but of the width and depth of the changes brought about by personal initiative. Like Bismarck, and Napoleon himself, Parnell lived too long, and the later part of his life was an anti-climax. I think myself that his mental and moral equilibrium was at all times very delicately poised, and once lost, he never regained it."

"Parnell was not eloquent, much less an orator. Possessed of singularly handsome features, he was slovenly in dress and untidy in appearance. He used to speak with one of his hands buried deeply in a front pocket of his trousers. He had no great command of language. But as he hissed out his sentences of concentrated passion and scorn, scattering his notes as he proceeded upon the seat behind him, he gave an impression of almost dæmonic self-control and illimitable strength. When he spoke for his party, in the tremendous moments of the crisis, Mr. Gladstone would move to the end of the front bench, and with his hand held behind his ear, listen to the freezing but impressive display with rapt attention. Either in the House or outside of it, Parnell appeared an isolated figure; "remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow," he came in and out without exchanging a word with anyone: the utmost concession that he appeared to make to companionship was when he would be met tramping the lobbies in earnest conversation with one of the few associates whom he deigned to consult."

"He had statesmanlike qualities; and I found him a wonderfully good man to do business with, until I discovered him to be a consummate liar."

"Accident made him a parliamentarian, but he was a cold-blooded tactician, amenable to liberal considerations but utterly immune from liberal sympathies. The romantic notion of the “brotherhood of man” disgusted Parnell."

"[T]he one man in politics for whom I was ever able to feel a genuine respect."

"Home Rule apart, he was himself a Tory."

"Mr. Parnell has proved to the world the kind of leader the Irish nation is on the point of losing. He is a man of iron determination, inflexible will, matchless courage and audacity and of peerless skill as a leader, but a man who will not allow even the demands of conscience and honour to stand in the way of his purposes, 'who neither fears God nor respects man'. ... Who can withhold his meed of admiration from the old fallen commander and who can help feeling compassion at the ruin of such grandeur!"

"Mr Butt was a lawyer, and believing that he could persuade Parliament of the justness of his cause, he attempted to effect a revolution by argument. ... Parnell appreciated the situation more correctly, but he was hampered by the crimes that clung round the Land League, and by the opposition of the landlords, naturally exasperated by attacks on their property."

"Mr. Parnell showed himself acute, frank, patient, closely attentive, and possessed of striking though not rapid insight. He never slurred over difficulties, nor tried to pretend that rough was smooth. On the other hand, he had nothing in common with that desperate species of counsellor, who takes all the small points, and raises objections instead of helping to contrive expedients. He measured the ground with a slow and careful eye, and fixed tenaciously on the thing that was essential at the moment. Of constructive faculty he never showed a trace. He was a man of temperament, of will, of authority, of power; not of ideas or ideals, or knowledge, or political maxims, or even of the practical reason in any of its higher senses, as Hamilton, Madison, and Jefferson had practical reason. But he knew what he wanted."

"He has many of the qualities of leadership—and time will give him more. He is cool—extremely so and resolute."

"“Ireland a nation!” These words justify me in summoning the pale and angry ghost of Parnell to stand beside the ghosts of Tone and Davis and Lalor and Mitchel. If words mean anything, these mean that to Parnell the final and inevitable and infinitely desirable goal of Ireland was Separation; and that those who thought it prudent and feasible, as he did, to proceed to Separation by Home Rule must above all things do nothing that might impair the Separatist position or render the future task of the Separatists more difficult. Of Parnell it may be said with absolute truth that he never surrendered the national position."