The Immortal Irishman Quotes

“But—damn it all—why does money have to be the marker of a man? That was the thing about America he most despised, measuring existence by the size of one’s pile.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“Fear, like self-pity, is a prison of its own making.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“Beyond these shores, whenever two or more Irishmen are gathered together, everything almost can be done.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“quality of the Irish,” the president concluded, is “the remarkable combination of hope, confidence and imagination.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“The Irish killed themselves with liquor, with accidents prompted by drink, with neglect, with disease, with violence, but would never end their lives by their own hands, for that would ensure that misery followed them to eternity.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“immigrant to live in the United States for twenty-five years before becoming eligible for citizenship.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“Perhaps no class of our fellow citizens has carried this prejudice against color to a point more extreme and dangerous than have our Catholic Irish fellow citizens,” he said. “And no people on the face of the earth have been more relentlessly persecuted and oppressed on account of race and religion than have these same Irish people. The Irish who, at home, readily sympathize with the oppressed everywhere, are instantly taught when they step upon our soil to hate and despise the Negro. They are taught that he eats the bread that belongs to them.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“An English traveler, James H. Juke, was aghast that a day’s sail could take him from a well-fed nation to an island of the wretched and dying. He saw Irish trying to exist on sand eels, turnip tops and seaweed—“a diet which no one in England would consider fit for the meanest animal which he kept.” The potato blight had not spared England, nor Holland, parts of France and Germany. Their crops also failed. But only in Ireland were people dying en masse. The cause had been planted in the land—not the potato, but English rule that had driven a majority of Irish from ground their ancestors had owned. “The terrifying exactitude of memory,” in Tocqueville’s phrase. Famines had come before, epochs of hunger that killed upwards of 70,000 in the worst case. But this starvation reached across the island—it was now the Great Hunger, an Gorta Mór, with a fatal toll ten times that of the Great Plague of London in 1665. And here was the tragedy: there was plenty of food in Ireland while the people starved. Irish rains produced a prodigious amount of Irish grains. Almost three fourths of the country’s cultivable land was in corn, wheat, oats and barley. The food came from Irish land and Irish labor. But it didn’t go into Irish mouths. About 1.5 billion pounds of grain and other foodstuffs were exported. The natives were hired hands and witnesses to these money crops, grown by Anglo landlords. Same with cattle, sheep and hogs raised within eyesight of the hollow-bellied. Famine-ravaged Ireland exported more beef than any other part of the British Empire.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“An iron will, no matter how lyrically shaped, they had to know, never beats an iron fist.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“peripatetic, globe-roaming mariner Captain James”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“The “quality of the Irish,” the president concluded, is “the remarkable combination of hope, confidence and imagination.” In”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“It is the soulless American who has no heart, who has no thought beyond putting a mighty dollar out at mighty interest, who has no zest for any other book than his soulless ledger.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“British Empire had demonstrated that there was no greater blind spot on its map of benevolence than the conquered land closest to home.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“that Young Irelandism will lead you to.” “It may lead me to danger. But it will guard me from dishonor.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“Meagher’s Ireland.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“The greatest empire the world had yet seen got its start with the conquest of Ireland back in 1171. And tiny Ireland was still the most troublesome turf under the Union Jack. China, India, entire subcontinents, could be subdued with less firepower than it took to keep the Irish in place.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero

“The seven-plus centuries of organized torment originated in a letter from Pope Adrian IV in 1155, which empowered King Henry II to conquer Ireland and its “rude and savage people.” It was decreed that the rogue Irish Catholic Church, a mutt’s mash of Celtic, Druidic, Viking and Gaelic influences, had strayed too far from clerical authority, at a time when English monarchs still obeyed Rome. Legend alone was not enough to save it—that is, the legend of Patrick, a Roman citizen who came to Ireland in a fifth-century slave ship and then convinced many a Celt to worship a Jewish carpenter’s son. Patrick traveled with his own brewer; the saint’s ale may have been a more persuasive selling point for Christianity than the trinity symbol of the shamrock. There followed centuries of relative peace, the island a hive of learned monks, masterly stonemasons and tillers of the soil, while Europe fell to Teutonic plunder. The Vikings, after much pillaging, forced interbreeding, tower-toppling and occasional acts of civic improvement (they founded Dublin on the south bank of the Liffey), eventually succumbed to the island’s religion as well. They produced children who were red-haired and freckled, the Norse-Celts. But by the twelfth century, Ireland was out of line. Does it matter that this Adrian IV, the former Nicholas Breakspear, was history’s only English pope? Or that the language of the original papal bull, with all its authoritative aspersions on the character of the Irish, has never been authenticated? It did for 752 years.”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America

“But just as he had made merry music with his clarinet at Stonyhurst while under suspension,”
― Tim Egan, The Immortal Irishman: Thomas Meager and the Invention of Irish America