Charles Stewart Parnell Quotes

Pay no rent under any pretext!

Fellow citizens:The hour to try your souls and to redeem your pledges has arrived.

[Y]ou have an expenditure of five or six millions of pounds sterling—nearly all of it paid by the English taxpayers, and all for the purpose of screwing rack-rents out of the Irish tenants. I am very sure that that sort of thing will not be allowed to go on. Would not it be a very wise thing for the Irish landlords to recognize the situation in time, to see that if they do not be reasonable they will be chucked overboard altogether?

You can never have civil liberty so long as strangers and Englishmen make your laws and so long as the occupiers of the soil own not an inch of it.

While we leave those things to time, circumstances and the future, we must each one of us resolve in our own hearts that we shall at all times do everything which within us lies to obtain Ireland the fullest measure of her rights.

Without the help of the people our exertions would be as nothing.

The law gave those landlords extensive power at the present time, and unless they went in for a revolution he confessed he did not see how they were going to bring about a radical reform of the system of land tenure in this country.

Richard Barry O'Brien: Every Irish Nationalist would go for separation if he thought he could get it; we are all Home Rulers because we do not believe separation is possible.
Charles Stewart Parnell: I have never gone for separation. I never said I would. The physical force men understand my position very well. I made it clear to them that I would be satisfied with a Parliament, and that I believed in our constitutional movement; but I also said that if our constitutional movement failed, I could not then stand in the way of any man who wished to go further and to try other means. That was the position I always took up. I have never changed, and I still believe in our constitutional movement. I believe that with our own Parliament, if England does not meddle, we can build up our country.

Do what is beyond your strength even should you fail sometimes.

Bring English tyranny to its knees.

Why should Ireland be treated as a geographical fragment of England, as he had heard an ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer call it some time ago. Ireland was not a geographical fragment, but a nation.

No man has the right to say to his country "Thus far shalt thou go and no further".

Stand together in face of the brutal, cowardly enemies of your race!

The government, with its bayonets, will learn in a single Winter how powerless are armed forces against the will of a united determined, and self-reliant nation.

No man has the right to fix the boundary to the march of a nation.