Words matter. These are the best Tom Paulin Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think protest and actions have to be organised against the Israelis and their backers. There needs to be a concerted high profile campaign to raise awareness of the people in this country.
I went to a grim Victorian school with classes of 40 or 50 children. It was a very rigid and unimaginative education, but it did teach us the three Rs.
I am not very moved by historical apologies.
This sympathy is not translated into force against the British government because it is not like the anti- apartheid movement which had a high profile here and Mandela is a more engaging figure than Yasser Arafat.
Teachers are the ministers and priests of culture, its practitioners and its emissaries.
In my view the European culture carries a very heavy responsibility for the creation of Israel… it is a product of both British and Stalin’s anti- Semitism, but the British never faced their own complicity in its construction.
I don’t think the British carry a historical consciousness either.
A truly vibrant and creative culture depends on a system of education which is not divided along class and sectarian lines.
Again and again, I find something eerie in many Irish occasions – the unrelenting whiteness, the emotional tribal attachments, the violent prejudices lurking beneath apparently pleasant social surfaces, the cosy smugness of belonging.
It’s ironic that early on in the war with Afghanistan, the Americans and the British were saying, ‘We recognise there must be a Palestinian state,’ then they rapidly forgot about it. I think history will show that that kind of amnesia will come back to haunt you.
I do think culture is an argument, and that was part of the way I was brought up. People at a social occasion in Ireland will start shouting and arguing. When the Yeats family lived in Bedford Park, they had to go round to the neighbours to say, ‘You might think we are fighting, but this is the way we talk to each other.’
I do most of the cooking. I’m kind of domestic, untidily so.
Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, ‘Certainly not.’
Look, you’re either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist: there’s no middle way. Everyone who supports the state of Israel is a Zionist.
My parents were Northern Ireland Labour party people. We read the ‘Guardian’ and the ‘New Statesman,’ listened to the BBC. The house was full of books. We didn’t get a television until ‘That Was The Week That Was’ started. There was nothing to do but read.
You are either a Zionist or an anti-Zionist.
Unfortunately, in the north and the south of Ireland, intolerant habits are part of the fabric of emotion, part of the identity crisis which afflicts the population of the country.
I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer’s life. On the other hand, it’s good to have another job. It gives you something to do.
