Quotes from John Boyle O'Reilly

Putting prize-fighting altogether aside as one of the unavoidable evils attending on this manly exercise, the inestimable value of boxing as a training, discipline, and development of boys and young men remains.

Organized charity, scrimped and iced, In the name of the cautious, statistical Christ.

Be silent and safe - silence never betrays you.

It is heroic to prepare for war with a tyrant power. Patriots will always win the admiration of mankind for daring to meet the bloodshed of battle for their country's liberty. But the patriot who is willing to go to that sacrifice will be the first to condemn the aimless and secret shedding of blood in time of peace.

The Greeks were the first boxers. Pugilism appears to have been one of the earliest distinctions in play and exercise that appeared between the Hellenes and their Asiatic fathers. The unarmed personal encounter was indicative of a sturdier manhood.

Too late we learn, a man must hold his friend Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end.

In 1889, I predict, the legislative stage of the Irish question will have arrived; and the union with England, which shall then have cursed Ireland for nine tenths of a century, will be repealed.

Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity.

With the advance of feudalism came the growth of iron armor, until, at last, a fighting-man resembled an armadillo.

For peace do not hope; to be just you must break it. Still work for the minute and not for the year.

The brutalities of a fight with bare hands, the crushed nasal bones, maimed lips, and other disfigurements, which call for the utter abolition of boxing in the interests of humanity, at once disappear when the contestants cover their hands with large, soft-leather gloves.

A good boxer, in striking the round blow, instead of loosening body and arm, gathers himself into a heap of muscularity and begins his blow where all blows ought to begin, from the solidarity of the right foot.

Who heeds not experience, trust him not.

Anonymity is the fame of the future.