John Philpot Curran Quotes

When I can't talk sense, I talk metaphor.

"I have never yet heard of a murderer who was not afraid of a ghost." - A retort to a unionist MP who spoke of how he shuddered each time he passed the now-empty Parliament House, Dublin. The MP had voted in favour of the Act of Union which abolished the Irish Parliament.

His smile is like the silver plate on a coffin.

Assassinate me you may; intimidate me you cannot.

My dear doctor, I am surprised to hear you say that I am coughing very badly, as I have been practising all night.

"Everything I see disgusts and depresses me: I look back at the streaming of blood for so many years, and everything everywhere relapsed into its former degradation – France rechained, Spain again saddled for the priests, and Ireland, like a bastinadoed elephant, kneeling to receive the paltry rider." – Written in a letter, after the exile of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Judge: (whose wig was awry, to Curran) Curran, do you see anything ridiculous in this wig?

"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt." – Speech upon the Right of Election for Lord Mayor of Dublin, 1790, as quoted in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations

"O Erin how sweetly thy green bosom rises,

In this administration, a place can be found for every bad man.

"If sadly thinking, with spirits sinking,

"No matter with what solemnities he may have been devoted on the altar of slavery, the moment he touches the sacred soil of Britain, the altar and the god sink together in the dust; his soul walks abroad in her own majesty; his body swells beyond the measure of his chains which burst from around him, and he stands redeemed, regenerated, and disenthralled, by the irresistible genius of universal emancipation." – (Curran's speech in defence of James Somersett, a Jamaican slave who declared his freedom upon being brought to Britain [where slavery was banned] by his master; quoted extensively by US abolitionists such as Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin, Chapter 37. Frederick Douglass always recited this speech on stage when playing Curran.)

"Twenty four millions of people have burst their chains, and on the altar erected by despotism for public slavery, have enthroned the image of public liberty" – Speaking of the French Revolution, 4 February 1790.