Irish Sympathy Quotes

-BDB on the board- Knitter's Anonimous May 8, 2006 Rhage (in his bedroom posting in V's room on the board) Hi, my name is V. ("Hi, V") I've been knitting for 125 years now. (*gasping noises*) It's begun to impact my personal relationships: my brothers think I'm a nancy. It's begun to affect my health: I'm getting a callus on my forefinger and I find bits of yarn in all my pockets and I'm starting to smell like wool. I can't concentrate at work: I keep picturing all these lessers in Irish sweaters and thick socks. (*sounds of sympathy*) I've come seeking a community of people who, like me, are trying not to knit. Can you help me? (*We're with you*) Thank you (*takes out hand-knitted hankie in pink*) (*sniffles*) ("We embrace you, V") Vishous (in the pit): Oh hell no...you did not just put that up. And nice spelling in the title. Man...you just have to roll up on me, don't you. I got four words for you, my brother. Rhage: Four words? Okay...lemme see... Rhage, you're so sexy. hmmm.... Rhage, you're SO smart. No wait! Rhage, you're SO right! That's it, isn't it...g'head. You can tell me. Vishous: First one starts with a "P" Use your head for the other three. Bastard. Rhage: P? Hmm... Please pass the yarn Vishous: Payback is a bitch! Rhage: Ohhhhhhhhhhhh I'm so scuuuuuurred. Can you whip me up a blanket to hide under?

I knew one boy who passed through several schools a dunce and a laughing-stock; the National Board and the Intermediate Board had sat in judgment upon him and had damned him as a failure before men and angels. Yet a friend and fellow-worker of mine discovered that he was gifted with a wondrous sympathy for nature, that he loved and understood the ways of plants, that he had a strange minuteness and subtlety of observation—that, in short, he was the sort of boy likely to become an accomplished botanist.

In addition to this crude notion of karma, and my sympathy for imagined babies and their imagined families, there also lurks something else: an illusion of control. There is so much in my life that I cannot hope to control. I can't control all my nights of broken sleep. I can't control the terrors that my mind chooses to review just as I close my eyes - the repetitive carousel of meningitis, comas, cars swept into oceans, house fires, or paedophiles. I can't control out landlord's whims, whether - or when - his voracity might lead to us moving house again. I can't control my children's chances of securing a place in the local primary school, whose enrollment policy (like most Irish schools) is predicated upon membership of the Catholic Church. I can, however, control the ritual of milk production: the sterilisation of the bottles, the components of the pump slotted in their correct order, the painstaking necessity of record-keeping, every procedure that I choose to perform carefully and correctly.

By the time he was six, Walter was luring tramps and other unsavory characters home with the promise of a meal. He loved to hear their tall tales. A year later, imitating an Irish neighbor, he began collecting dialects, a lifelong pursuit that helped him, by listening carefully, play characters by ear, getting their “voice tone” and phrasing right. He had an unusual sympathy for old people, a fondness for underdogs, and a “fine scorn for stuffed shirts

It was here that Lieutenant Thomas Kettle fell, leading a company of the 9th Royal Dublin Fusiliers just ahead of Lieutenant Emmet Dalton – who won a Military Cross in the engagement, acquired the nickname ‘Ginchy’, later became IRA Director of Munitions, and was to reach the rank of general in the army of independent Ireland. Kettle was a former Irish nationalist MP and Professor of National Economics at University College Dublin, who had been in Belgium at the beginning of the war buying guns for the nationalist Irish Volunteers. He joined up believing that the war had a just cause, being fought on behalf of small nations such as Belgium, Serbia and Ireland too. But he had been dispirited by the Easter Rising in Dublin. While he had no sympathy with the rebels, he correctly predicted how posterity might view him vis-à-vis the 1916 leaders. ‘These men,’ he wrote, ‘will go down in history as heroes and martyrs, and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer.

When their father, the High King, learnt how that Eochaid had brought about his daughters’ dishonour and death, he rallied auxiliaries to his aid, and marched into Leinster, ravaging it as he went. The province and its king were saved only by Eochald’s humiliated submission, and his binding the province to pay to the High King at Tara, every alternate year for an Indefinite period, the tremendous tribute which came to be known as the Boru or cow-tribute — five thousand cows, five thousand hogs, five thousand cloaks, five thousand vessels of brass and bronze, and five thousand ounces of silver. This crushing tribute was henceforth laid upon Leinster, by the High King of Tara from the time of Tuathal forward till the reign of Fionnachta, a period of five hundred years — but in most cases having to be lifted with steel hands. It caused more bloody history than did almost any other festering sore with which Ireland was ever afflicted. During these five centuries hardly a High King sat upon the throne of Tara, who did not have to carry the bloody sword into Leinster again and again, forcibly to hack his pound of flesh from off that province’s palpitating body. And only sometimes was the fight fought between Meath and Leinster alone. Often, through alliances, mutual sympathies, antagonisms, hopes, or dangers, half of Ireland, and sometimes all of Ireland was embroiled. So, together with much that was good Tuathal left to his country a bloody legacy.[15]

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French, Americans. Scandanvian-Americans, Italian-Americans, [African-Americans,] each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The only [one] who is a good American is the [one] who is an American and nothing else.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French, Americans. Scandinavian-Americans, Italian-Americans, [African-Americans,] each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The only [one] who is a good American is the [one] who is an American and nothing else.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French, Americans. Scandinavian-Americans, Italian-Americans, [African-Americans, Asian-American,] each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic. The only [one] who is a good American is the [one] who is an American and nothing else.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all … The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality, than with the other citizens of the American Republic … There is no such thing as a hyphenated American who is a good American. The only man who is a good American is the man who is an American and nothing else.

Gladstone is remembered for putting the nation’s finances in good order, for establishing the chancellorship of the exchequer as the second post in the government, for his love of liberty and close sympathy for the peoples of subject nations (including the Irish), for his advocacy of international arbitration, and his preference for pursuing a peaceful, non-expansionist foreign policy. He became a hero to many people both inside and outside the Liberal Party, and proved an inspiration to generations of Liberal, and later Labour, politicians. Inevitably, however, with the passage of years his memory has faded, and there are nowadays perhaps only a few veterans of the Liberal Democratic Party who feel any personal affinity with him.