Conor Cruise O'Brien Quotes

The United Nations cannot do anything, and never could. It is not an animate entity or agent. It is a place, a stage, a forum and a shrine…a place to which powerful people can repair when they are fearful about the course on which their own rhetoric seems to be propelling them.

We dislike the IRA, most of us, and fear it. We are a peaceful and democratic people. But our history, our idealistic pretensions and our fatal ambivalence have stuck us with an ideology that is warlike and anti-democratic, and calls increasingly for further human sacrifice.

Irishness is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language: it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift is more Irish than Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English.