A collection of quotes on the topic of bagpipe, play.
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci (1938), XLV Prophecies
“An Irish gentleman is someone who can play the bagpipes but won’t.”
First ascribed to Wilde by The Boston Globe in 1991. The joke probably appeared for the first time in 1917, when The Atchison Weekly Globe attributed it to a local man named Frank Fiest.
Misattributed
Source: My Idea of a Gentleman Is He Who Can Play a Cornet and Won’t, Quote Investigator, 14 August 2021 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/04/21/cornet/,
“I'll bet there aren't too many people hooked on crack who can play the bagpipes.”
Source: Brain Droppings
Angus McLeod. Christopher Monckton and his support for subsidies to Scotland, Sunday Mail, April 16, 1995.
1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)
Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. xiv
Context: The role of religion is to integrate the Cosmology and the Morality, to render the cosmological narrative so rich and compelling that it elicits our allegiance and our commitment to its emergent moral understandings. As each culture evolves, a unique Cosmos and Ethos appear in its co-evolving religion. For billions of us, back to the first humans, the stories, ceremonies, and art associated with our religions-of-origin are central to our matrix.
I stand in awe of these religions. I am deeply enmeshed in one of them myself. I have no need to take on the contradictions or immiscibilities between them, any more that I would quarrel with the fact that Scottish bagpipes coexist with Japanese tea ceremonies.
“When you’ve heard one bagpipe tune you’ve heard them both.”
Source: From Time to Time (1995), Chapter 28 (p. 285)
