“This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker. But I think we may chalk up this attitude to his Irishness.”

— Thomas Cahill, book How the Irish Saved Civilization

Source: How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), Ch. VI What Was Found

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "This swaggering behavior has confounded historians, prompting them to wonder if Columbanus was a little off his rocker.…" by Thomas Cahill?

Thomas Cahill photo

Thomas Cahill58

American scholar and writer 1940

Related quotes

“Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly.”

Jean Cocteau (1889–1963) French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager and filmmaker

Les Enfants Terribles translation by Rosamond Lehmann (1929)

“When we read of human beings behaving in certain ways, with the approval of the author, who gives his benediction to this behavior by his attitude towards the result of the behavior arranged by himself, we can be influenced towards behaving in the same way.”

T.S. Eliot (1888–1965) 20th century English author

“When I see a merchant over-polite to his customers, begging them to taste a little brandy and throwing half his goods on the counter,—thinks I, that man has an axe to grind.”

Charles Miner (1780–1865) American politician

"Who ’ll turn Grindstones" from Essays from the Desk of Poor Robert the Scribe, Doylestown, Pa., (1815); first published in the Wilkesbarre Gleaner (1811).

“He dressed up like a clown for them
With his face paint white and red.
And on his best behavior
In a dark room on the bed,
He kissed them all.”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

Lyrics, Illinois (2005)

“[W]e would probably claim Kafka as an Irish writer. His tone of voice is certainly quite Irish: that sense of melancholy, that sense of strangeness and of being a stranger in the world. I think that we empathise with that very much indeed.”

John Banville (1945) Irish writer

John Banville: claiming Kafka as an Irish writer (2011)

“He had sworn on his father's honour, his mother's life, his brother's masculinity, his sister's purity and his prophet's beard that he would never set foot there again. God, knowing people, thinks little of honour or purity or even life, but vows made on his prophet he loves to confound.”

Ian McDonald book The Dervish House

Source: The Dervish House (2010), Ch. 5, §6 (p. 178)

“You know, all insanity is a form of artistic expression, I often think. Only the person has nothing but himself to work with—he can’t get at outside materials to manipulate them—so he puts all his art into his behavior.”

Fritz Leiber book Our Lady of Darkness

Source: Our Lady of Darkness (1977), Chapter 10 (p. 56)

“We are not philosophers, we are sovereigns. The rules that govern our behavior are not the rules for other men, and our honor, I think, is a different thing entirely, difficult for anyone but the historians and the gods to judge.”

Megan Whalen Turner book A Conspiracy of Kings

Source: A Conspiracy of Kings

“Is there life before death? That's chalked up
In Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,
Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,
We hug our little destiny again.”

Seamus Heaney (1939–2013) Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer

"Whatever You Say, Say Nothing", line 57, from North (1975).
Other Quotes

“The judges of normality are present everywhere. We are in the society of the teacher-judge, the doctor-judge, the educator-judge, the social worker-judge; it is on them that the universal reign of the normative is based; and each individual, wherever he may find himself, subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behavior, his aptitudes, his achievements.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Discipline and Punish (1977)

Related topics