Irish Famine Quotes

The famine has been sent by God to teach the Irish a lesson.... The real evil with which we have to contend is not the physical evil of the famine, but the moral evil of the selfish, perverse and turbulent character of the people.

The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.

Ireland never lacked the capacity to feed its people. During the entire 'great famine,' the island continued to produce massive amounts of beef and grain. The Irish just couldn't afford to buy any of it due to the enforcement of rack-renting, high taxation, and suppression of manufactures.

During this glorious reign Ireland has seen 1,225,000 of her children die of famine, starved to death whilst the produce of her soil and their labor was eaten up by a vulture aristocracy, enforcing their rents by the bayonets of a hired assassin army in the pay of the –best of the English Queens’

My ancestors came from Co Roscommon, transported to Van Diemen's Land for stealing food.

Hardly any famine affects more than 5 percent, almost never more than 10 percent, of the population. The largest proportion of a population affected was the Irish famine of the 1840s, which came close to 10 percent over a number of years.

I don't know how much the economy has changed since Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal.'

… the annihilation of Ireland.

The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was a time of restatement in Ireland. After the famine, after the failed rebellions of the Forties and Sixties, the cultural and political desires for self-determination began to shape each other in a series of riffs on independence and identity.

If the Kennedys had been barred from entering America after fleeing Ireland during the famine, my grandfather never would have been president.

A thousand emigrants per day still leaving from our Irish ports, most of them with money. The runaway farmers have learned the trick of thrashing out their corn by night, leaving the straw neatly cocked, selling off stock and furniture and bolting, with heavy arrears due to the ruined landlords.

My mom was a single mother. She had six siblings in a big Irish family, all descended from shanty Irish folks who arrived after the Famine. They settled along the Cuyahoga River. It's the river that caught on fire. We're real good at picking real estate.

Between 1845 and 1855, 2,100,000 chose to escape from Ireland; of those 1,500,000 went to the United States.