English Oppression Quotes

Fraud, robbery, and murder have characterized the English usurpation of the government of our country. Why, for the last fifty years we have been robbed in the matter of taxes of hundreds of millions.

I'm William Wallace, and the rest of you will be spared. Go back to England and tell them... Scotland is free!

It is in that English Parliament the chains for Ireland are forged

People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty; the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests; bullying school masters; the English and the terrible things they did to us for eight hundred long years. Above all -- we were wet.

We can never beat England, can’t even remain long in a fight with her on her own terms. All we can do, and it should be enough, is to remain Irish in spite of her, and work out our destiny in the very many fields in which we are free to do so.

For generations the shamrock was banned as a national emblem of Ireland, but in her extremity England uses the shamrock as a means for exciting in foolish Irishmen loyalty to England. For centuries the green flag of Ireland was a thing accurst and hated by the English garrison in Ireland, as it is still in their inmost hearts. But in India, in Egypt, in Flanders, in Gallipoli, the green flag is used by our rulers to encourage Irish soldiers of England to give up their lives for the power that denies their country the right of nationhood.

We intend, Citizen General, to restore to a people ripe for revolution, the independence and liberty for which it clamors. Ireland has groaned under the hateful yoke of England for centuries. The Defenders … are already secretly armed…. Detach Ireland from England, and she will be reduced to a second-rate power.

It is in that English Parliament the chains for Ireland are forged, and any Irish patriot who goes into that forge to free Ireland will soon find himself welded into the agency of his country's subjection to England.