As our language wanes and dies, the golden legends of the far-off centuries fade and pass away. No one sees their influence upon culture; no one sees their educational power.

I do not share the wish to see my language dead and decently buried.

Every crag and gnarled tree and lonely valley has its own strange and graceful legend attached to it.

Now if we allow our living language to die out, it is almost a certainty that we condemn our literary records to remain in obscurity.

We are above and beyond all politics, all parties and all factions; offending nobody – except the anti-Irishman.

We must put pressure upon our politicians not to snuff out by their tacit discouragement merely because they do not happen to understand it.

What I advocate brings with it no substantial or material advantage at all. It will neither make money nor help to make money.

What we want in Ireland is a National University which will bring students together and educate them upon national lines.

We are told that the keeping alive a language spoken by so small a number of the community is a barrier to progress.

Englishmen have very noble and excellent qualities which I should like to see imitated here, but I should not like to imitate them in everything. I like our own habits and character better, they are...

I cannot conceive a more acute pain in the power of sentiment to inflict than that which I should feel if, after a life passed in England or the colonies or India, I were to...

How many Irishmen are there who would purchase material prosperity at such a price? It is exactly such a question as this and the answer to it that shows the difference between the English and...

In order to de-Anglicize ourselves, we must at once arrest the decay of the language. We must teach ourselves not to be ashamed of ourselves.

I – and there are hundreds of thousands of Irishmen who felt on this subject as I do – have always liked my Celtic countrymen and disliked the English nation; it is a national trait...

It is a most disgraceful shame the way in which Irishmen are brought up. They are ashamed of their language, institutions, and of everything Irish.

For the first time in Ireland within my recollection, Catholic and Protestant, Unionist and Nationalist, landlord and tenant, priest and parson, all work hand in hand in the interest of Ireland’s life and intellectuality.

The literary activity of even the eighteenth century among the Gaels was very great.