Daniel O'Connell - O'Connell Quotes

O'Connell Quotes

• 'The altar of liberty totters when it is cemented only with blood'

• "Gentlemen, you may soon have the alternative to live as slaves or die as free men" (speaking in Mallow, County Cork)

• 'Good God, what a brute man becomes when ignorant and oppressed. Oh Liberty! What horrors are committed in thy name! May every virtuous revolutionist remember the horrors of Wexford'!

• 'My days – the blossom of my youth and the flower of my manhood – have been darkened by the dreariness of servitude. In this my native land – in the land of my sires – I am degraded without fault as an alien and an outcast.'

• 'How cruel the Penal Laws are which exclude me from a fair trial with men whom I look upon as so much my inferiors ...'.

• '... I want to make all Europe and America know it – I want to make England feel her weakness if she refuses to give the justice we require – the restoration of our domestic parliament ...'.

• 'There is an utter ignorance of, and indifference to, our sufferings and privations ... What care they for us, provided we be submissive, pay the taxes, furnish recruits for the Army and Navy and bless the masters who either despise or oppress or combine both? The apathy that exists respecting Ireland is worse than the national antipathy they bear us'.

• 'No person knows better than you do that the domination of England is the sole and blighting curse of this country. It is the incubus that sits on our energies, stops the pulsation of the nation's heart and leaves to Ireland not gay vitality but horrid the convulsions of a troubled dream'.

• 'The principle of my political life ... is, that all ameliorations and improvements in political institutions can be obtained by persevering in a perfectly peaceable and legal course, and cannot be obtained by forcible means, or if they could be got by forcible means, such means create more evils than they cure, and leave the country worse than they found it.'

• "No man was ever a good soldier but the man who goes into the battle determined to conquer, or not to come back from the battle field (cheers). No other principle makes a good soldier." O'Connell recalling the spirited conduct of the Irish soldiers in Wellington's army, at the Monster meeting held at Mullaghmast.

• "The poor old Duke ! What shall I say of him? To be sure he was born in Ireland, but being born in a stable does not make a man a horse." Shaw's Authenticated Report of the Irish State Trials (1844), p. 93