A Quote by W. C. Sellar

British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question.

W. C. Sellar

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W. C. Sellar
December 27, 1898 - June 11, 1951

William Ewart Gladstone is credited with the credo that a prime minister must be a "good butcher." The metaphor is apt insofar as the root of the word "decision" is "to cut."

James M Strock

The Irish question is this: Do the Irish know the answer to everything? ... And the answer to that is that we know fifteen different answers to every question. All of them right.

Olivia Robertson

No Irish nationalist could support any treaty which institutionalizes British government claims to a part of Irish national territory. Indeed, the term - 'constitutional nationalism'- used by Mr.Mallon (SDLP) and his colleagues to describe their political philosophy is a contradiction in terms. The only constitutional nationalist in Ireland today is Sean McBride. He puts his nationalism within a framework of Irish constitutionality. Mr. Mallon, however, puts his within the framework of British constitutionality. Irish nationalism within British constitutionality is a contradiction in terms.

Gerry Adams

The English and Americans dislike only some Irish--the same Irish that the Irish themselves detest, Irish writers--the ones that think.

Brendan Behan

[Congress] is not the British Parliament, and I hope it never will become the British Parliament... Are we going to bring the president in here and have a question period like the prime minister has in Great Britain?

Trent Lott

The trouble with the Irish question always has been that it was an English question.

Katharine Tynan

I feel warm toward my Irish side, but I don't know the country or the people. Hearing a traditional Irish fiddle, I feel very connected to Ireland, but that's a nostalgia many people feel who aren't Irish at all.

Daniel Hope

All my family look Irish. They act Irish. My sister even has red hair... it's crazy. I'm the one that doesn't seem Irish. None of the kids in my family, my siblings, speak with an Irish accent... we've never lived there full-time; we weren't born there. We just go there once or twice a year. It's weird. Our parents sound Irish, but we don't.

Stella Maxwell

On the Northern Ireland question, for instance, the British and Irish governments prohibit media contact with members of the IRA, but we have always gone ahead, believing in the right to information.

Kate Adie

In philosophy it is always good to put a question instead of an answer to a question. For an answer to the philosophical question may easily be unfair; disposing of it by means of another question is not.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

So is the English Parliament provincial. Mere country bumpkins, they betray themselves, when any more important question arises for them to settle, the Irish question, for instance,--the English question why did I not say? Their natures are subdued to what they work in. Their "good breeding" respects only secondary objects.

Henry David Thoreau

I've always been conscious of the fact that there aren't enough Irish voices on British television compared to the amount of Irish people who live there.

Chris O'Dowd

All these mountains of Irish dead, all these corpses mangled beyond recognition, all these arms, legs, eyes, ears, fingers, toes, hands, all these shivering putrefying bodies and portions of bodies once warm living and tender parts of Irish men and youths - all these horrors in Flanders or the Gallipoli Peninsula, are all items in the price Ireland pays for being part of the British Empire.

James Connolly

Once, when a British Prime Minister sneezed, men half a world away would blow their noses. Now when a British Prime Minister sneezes nobody else will even say 'Bless You'.

Bernard Levin

I'm Irish as hell: Kelly on one side, Shanley on the other. My father had been born on a farm in the Irish Midlands. He and his brothers had been shepherds there, cattle and sheep, back in the early 1920s. I grew up surrounded by brogues and Irish music, but stayed away from the old country till I was over 40. I just couldn't own being Irish.

John Patrick Shanley

In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imagination – making it more humane and more noble while keeping it Irish.

Thomas Cahill

A Quote by W. C. Sellar

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