politicians-from-ireland

"It is not those who can inflict the most but those that can suffer the most who will conquer."

"I am confident that my death will do more to smash the British Empire than my release."

"In a physical contest on the field of battle it is allowable to use tactics and strategy, to retreat as well as advance, to have recourse to a ruse as well as open attack; but in matters of principle there can be no tactics, there is one straightforward course to follow, and that course must be found and followed without swerving to the end."

"I want you to bear witness that I die as a Soldier of the Irish Republic."

"If I die the fruit will exceed the cost a thousand fold. The thought of it makes me happy. I thank God for it."

"The most remarkable step which Tippoo has lately taken, is his communication with Zemaun Shah . . . if an invasion of Hindostan should ever seriously be attempted by Zemaun Shah, the diversion of our force, which would be occasioned by such an event, would offer the most favourable opportunity to an attack from Tippoo on our possessions in the Peninsula. No mode of carrying on war against us could be more vexatious or more distressing to our resources than a combined attack upon Oude [Oudh] and the Carnatic . . . Zemaun Shah has not abandoned his project of invading Hindostan, and that the safest means of rendering that project abortive will be to consider it as practicable, and to take the best precautions against it which the advantages of our situation and the interval of time can furnish . . . I wish to know from you, whether we ought to suffer, without animadversion and spirited representation, such open acts of hostility on the part of Tippoo? My ideas on this subject are, that as on the one hand we ought never to use any high language towards Tippoo, nor ever attempt to deny him the smallest point of his just rights, so on the other, where we have distinct proofs of his machinations against us, we ought to let him know that his treachery does not escape our observation, and to make him feel that he is within the reach of our vigilance. At present it appears to me that he is permitted to excite ill will against us wherever he pleases, without the least attempt on our part to reprehend either him for the suggestion, or the Court, to whom he applies, for listening to it."

""Evil prospers when good men do nothing." (Also attributed to Edmund Burke; the quote cannot be definitely traced to either man.)"

""If sadly thinking, with spirits sinking,"

"My dear doctor, I am surprised to hear you say that I am coughing very badly, as I have been practising all night."

""Everything I see disgusts and depresses me: I look back at the streaming of blood for so many years, and everything everywhere relapsed into its former degradation – France rechained, Spain again saddled for the priests, and Ireland, like a bastinadoed elephant, kneeling to receive the paltry rider." – Written in a letter, after the exile of Napoleon Bonaparte."

""Twenty four millions of people have burst their chains, and on the altar erected by despotism for public slavery, have enthroned the image of public liberty" – Speaking of the French Revolution, 4 February 1790."

""O Erin how sweetly thy green bosom rises,"

""It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." – Speech upon the Right of Election for Lord Mayor of Dublin, 1790, as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations"

""No matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted on the altar of slavery, the moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains which burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of universal emancipation." – (Curran's speech in defence of James Somersett, a Jamaican slave who declared his freedom upon being brought to Britain [where slavery was banned] by his master; quoted extensively by US abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter 37. Frederick Douglass always recited this speech on stage when playing Curran.)"

"When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor."

"In this administration, a place can be found for every bad man."

"Judge: (whose wig was awry, to Curran) Curran, do you see anything ridiculous in this wig?"

"Assassinate me you may; intimidate me you cannot."

""I have never yet heard of a murderer who was not afraid of a ghost." - A retort to a unionist MP who spoke of how he shuddered each time he passed the now-empty Parliament House, Dublin. The MP had voted in favour of the Act of Union which abolished the Irish Parliament."

"His smile is like the silver plate on a coffin."

"We despise and abominate the details of partizan warfare, but we now are, as we always have been, decidedly and conscientiously attached to what is called the Tory, and which might with more propriety be called the Conservative, party; a party which we believe to compose by far the largest, wealthiest, and most intelligent and respectable portion of the population of this country, and without whose support any administration that can be formed will be found deficient both in character and stability."

"To the British Museum. I looked over the Travels of the Duke of Tuscany, and found the passage the existence of which Croker denies. His blunders are really incredible. The article has been received with general contempt. Really Croker has done me a great service. I apprehended a strong reaction, the natural effect of such a success; and, if hatred had left him free to use his very slender faculties to the best advantage, he might have injured me much. He should have been large in acknowledgment; should have taken a mild and expostulatory tone; and should have looked out for real blemishes, which, as I too well know, he might easily have found. Instead of that, he has written with such rancour as to make everybody sick. I could almost pity him. But he is a bad, a very bad, man: a scandal to politics and to letters."

"At a distance of forty years, [it was] the most brilliant scene in the House of Commons during the twenty-three years he was member of it."

"Impressed as we are with a deep sentiment of the consistency and strength which the revolutionary party have obtained, and are hourly increasing throughout Europe, we shall not fail to recur to the subject whenever we see the press of this country called in aid of the schemes of Buonaparte, or of Buonaparte's auxiliaries, and we shall contribute our mite to the resolution of that famous problem, whether, in a free press, the force of reason and truth, and the principles of order, good morals and true religion, are a match for the adroitness and the audacity of the philosophers of the Revolution and their disciples—the loose in morals, the factious in politics—the preachers of liberty, the practisers of despotism."

"My memory and observation of public affairs are about coeval with that event [the French Revolution]. I was in my ninth year when the Bastille was taken; it naturally made a great impression on me, and the bloody scenes that so rapidly followed rendered that impression unfavourable. Such also was the feeling of my wise and excellent parents, and an alliance between our family and that of Mr. Burke helped to confirm us in that great man's prophetic opinions, which every event from that day to this appears to me to have wonderfully illustrated and fulfilled."

"I prefer an ounce of fact to a ton of imagination."

"There is nothing for which one—at least I—should so much envy as Sir W. Scott as the bold facility with which he seized a subject and by the first glance determined all its properties. He was perpetually wrong in his details, but always right, luminous, and I had almost said exact, in his general view—but I am not of that power. I do nothing at all approaching to well but what I understand in its details. Would I could."

"Even though the East Retford case had never happened, or even though it had been decided in a different way, there occurred subsequently other events, as we shall by and by show, which would inevitably have brought us to the present crisis; which, we repeat, has been produced by the state of parties, and not by any general desire for Reform in the public mind. It was the state of parties which waked the spirit of Reform, and not Reform which created the state of parties; and it was only as the Retford question happened to operate on the state of parties, that it had any immediate effect on the question of Reform."

"The public mind of France had become so excited and perverted by a variety of causes great and small, and of grievances real and imaginary, that at the proclamation for assembling the States-General the whole nation went mad, and to this hour has never recovered from its insanity."

"Croker is the calumniator general of the human race."

"I am much obliged to you for...your poem, which I have read with great satisfaction. I did not think a battle could be turned into anything so entertaining."

"Croker, it is true, was always going to write a general history of the Revolution... Croker spent a life-time accumulating material for that purpose. But he never produced the finished article, he was more a seeker after curia, a collector of autographs, than a historian. At least he went to France to get the stuff, bequeathing to the British Museum the finest collection of printed material in existence. He was even aware of the Sections, the sans-culottes. And he did much more for the future of revolutionary studies than any of the others."

"The fatal consequences are that Peel, by betraying the precise and specific principle upon which he was brought into office, has ruined the character of public men, and dissolved, by dividing, the great landed interest—the only solid foundation on which any Government can be formed in this country. I care comparatively little about his actual corn law experiment; it will fail, and England will right herself from this fraudulent humbug; but while that process is going on, we shall be running all the risks, if not suffering the actual infliction, of a revolution. On the principle on which we have truckled to the League, how are we to resist the attack on the Irish Church—the Irish Union—both much worse cases (in that view) than the Corn Laws. How to maintain primogeniture, the Bishops, the House of Lords, the Crown? Sir Robert Peel has put these into more peril than Cobbett, or Cobden, or O'Connell, or they altogether could have done, and his personal influence has carried away individuals; he has broken up the old interests, divided the great families, and commenced just such a revolution as the Noailles and Montmorencies did in 1789. Look at father and son, and brother and brother, and uncle and nephew—thrown into personal hostility in half the counties of England, and all for what?—to propitiate Richard Cobden."

"I have just heard your friend Croker, and you could not wish him or any favourite of yours to have made a stronger or more favourable impression upon the House. His speech was one which was calculated to conciliate at this side of the Channel and to gratify at the other. It was replete with ingenuity and yet free from fanciful refinement. It was characterised by an acuteness of legal deduction, and yet exempt from sophistry or the pedantry of profession. It treated a worn-out subject so as to make it appear a new one. But its principal merit in my eyes lay in its frankness, warmth, and sincerity. It redeemed the pledge and fulfilled the promise of his ‘Historical Sketch.’ It showed him to be an honest Irishman no less than an able statesman. It showed him at this moment to be disinterested, and ready to quit the road of fortune under the auspices of his personal friend Peel, if the latter was only to be conciliated by what Oxonians term orthodoxy, and we Cantabs consider as intolerance."

"He was manifestly a man of strict honour, of high principle, of upright life, of great courage, of untiring industry, devoted with singleness of heart to the interests of his country, a loyal friend, and in his domestic relations unexceptionable. Living in the days when party rancour raged, prominent as a speaker in parliament, and wielding a trenchant and too often personally aggressive pen in the leading organ of the tory party, he came in for a very large share of the misrepresentation which always pursues political partisans. His literary tastes were far from catholic in their range, and he made himself obnoxious to the newer school by the dogmatic and narrow spirit and the sarcastic bitterness which are apt to be the sins that more easily beset the self-constituted and anonymous critics of a leading review. Thus to political adversaries he added many an enemy in the field of literature."

"The "rush to the town" is known to be one of the signs of racial ruin. It foreran the fall of Rome and of other great powers of the past. Peasant nations may be subjected, but they outlive their oppressors; for in them the family, which is the living cell of the nation, has a direct source of life in the land on which it lives, and States and empires might go into anarchy, yet the peasant community would survive. A wide view of history shows that humanity flourishes when the town is the adminicle of a rural society, the centre in which it has craftsmen to make its tools, merchants to exchange its wares, and colleges to educate its people. When the balance tilts, and the town becomes the main and normal dwelling place of the race, with the countryside merely its vegetable garden—when, so to speak, man goes indoors to live and gives up the open-air—then decay begins and doom, within a few generations, is certain."

"The Jesuit in Berkeley Square."

"In regard to what you say about any intimate connexion between Lansdowne and me, I agree almost entirely with you, except perhaps that I do not give him the credit for sincerity in any system which you seem to do. I never can have a good opinion of him, and still less a great one. However, we are upon terms of the greatest civility, and it must be confessed that his conduct for these last three years has had an openness and consistency, which entitles him to every outward mark of respect, from those who think as we do."

"His observations on publick life were often original and just, and on individual character shrewd, sagacious, and happy. Though he had studied nothing methodically, he had felt strongly, and thought deeply and intensely on many things. I have known few men whose maxims recur more frequently to my recollection, or are more applicable to the events of the world, and to the characters of those who rule it. Though there was, perhaps, not much candour or justice, there was yet elevation in his character, and I have observed traits of real magnanimity in his conduct."

"If lord Shelburne was not a Catiline, or a Borgia in morals, it must not be ascribed to any thing but his understanding."

"He was the only minister he ever heard of who did not fear the people."

"Lord Shelburne was the first great minister who comprehended the rising importance of the middle class; and foresaw in its future power a bulwark for the throne against "the Great Revolution families." Of his qualities in council we have no record; there is reason to believe that his administrative ability was conspicuous; his speeches prove that, if not supreme, he was eminent, in the art of parliamentary disputation, while they show on all the questions discussed a richness and variety of information, with which the speeches of no statesman of that age except Mr. Burke can compare."

"Indeed, he was, from conviction, sincerely averse to all commercial restraints and all religious intolerance. In his publick speeches he wanted method and perspicuity, and was deficient in justness of reasoning, in judgment, and in taste; but he had some imagination, some wit, great animation, and both in sarcasm and invective not unfrequently rose to eloquence."

"Goldsmith the other day put a paragraph into the newspapers, in praise of Lord Mayor Townshend. The same night we happened to sit next to Lord Shelburne, at Drury Lane; I mentioned the circumstance of the paragraph to him; he said to Goldsmith, that he hoped that he had mentioned nothing about Malagrida in it. "Do you know," answered Goldsmith, "that I never could conceive the reason why they call you Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good sort of man." You see plainly, what he meant to say, but that happy turn of expression is peculiar to himself."

"The Marquis denied having recommended a change of Government; he only desired the present system should be changed for a constitutional system; and he would contend for a constitutional Government, even though it was the fashion for Ministers to insinuate, that those who recommended any change were Jacobins. He denied having any Jacobin principles about him, and asserted, he had always advised Ministers against Jacobin principles, because he was convinced they went to a community of goods, and other absurd and pernicious doctrines."

"He raised me from the bottomless pit of humiliation—he made me feel I was something."

"Great moments have always produced great men, and great actions. The time of conflict is the time in which nature seems to delight in her grandest productions. From the Grecian republics, down even to our modern history, the most resplendent powers of man have been shown in the times of the greatest danger. The present, therefore, is a school for Frenchmen; every youth devotes himself to the cause of liberty, and thus actively engaged on the grand scene, all the powers of his soul take a warlike direction; it becomes a fashion, and the whole of the rising generation are educated in the military art; not, my lords, as our youth are educated to the military art, as one only of the professions in which they may rise to eminence or distinction, but the enthusiasm of war enters into the heart only from the enthusiasm of liberty; and the whole country is taught to feel that their only occupation, their only passion, ought to be arms, because their only good, their only blessing, is independence."

"He was of opinion that some precaution was necessary, and these admissions, he trusted, would at least be sufficient to exempt him from the charge of Jacobinism.—But the present bills appeared to him greatly to overshoot the mark. The circumstances did not warrant such an inroad on the constitution."

"Noble lords would do him the justice to recollect, that not one session had passed over since 1793, in which he had not, to use a vulgar but a strong expression, bored their lordships with his prophetic admonitions."

"Situated as we are between the old world and the new, and between the southern and northern Europe, all that we ought to covet upon earth is free trade, and fair equality. With more industry, with more enterprize, with more capital than any trading nation upon earth, it ought to be our constant cry, let every market be open, let us meet our rivals fairly, and we ask no more."