Top 66 Welsh Quotes

The working classes in England were always sentimental, and the Irish and Scots and Welsh. The upper-class English are the stiff-upper-lipped ones. And the middle class. They’re the ones who are crippled emotionally because they can’t move up, and they’re desperate not to move down.

I think it’s unfair to criticise someone for not being Welsh, but the smaller the nation, the more patriotic you seem to be.

I’m a hugely proud Welsh person. I just love it – it’s something very special, being Welsh.

English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish football gains so much from being in Europe. Clubs and fans all benefit from European action, laws and funding.

I was shocked by the amount of Welsh people in L.A. We’d go to this British pub to watch the ‘Six Nations’ early in the morning and I remember the first time I walked in it was just a sea of red.

My Welsh grandmother Mair didn’t meet my grandfather until she was 28, quite old to be unmarried in the early ’40s.

My eldest son you know, in his short life so far, he’s experimented with Corbynism, Communism, Brexit. He’s now Welsh nationalist and libertarian.

The Welsh have everywhere adopted the Cymric tongue; they hug themselves in the belief that they are pure descendants of the ancient Britons, but in fact, they are rather Silurians than Celts.

Dai Greene will be our greatest-ever Welsh athlete.

At most grounds you’re not particularly conscious of the crowd but in Cardiff, with the roof closed against a good Welsh team, the noise is impossible to ignore. It can be loud enough to put you off your game and the Welsh undoubtedly possess some of the most passionate fans in the world.

It’s a really exciting time to be involved in Welsh rugby.

I’ve been lucky that I’ve performed with a lot of the classical people I’ve wanted to work with so I’d like to do something that people didn’t see coming. Like Madonna, or being Welsh – the Tom Jones thing. Or somebody suggested N-Dubz – that would be brilliant!

I still dream about that one opportunity where the Welsh Rugby Union call me up and say, ‘We need you.’ There is an incredibly talented Welsh hooker called Matthew Rees, so maybe some incredible quirk of misfortune for him would mean I get called up instead.

The ‘Weston’ is actually my middle name. I hyphenated it because I really wasn’t willing to go out in the acting world as ‘Tom Jones,’ ’cause I’m Welsh as well, so the connotation is just ridiculous.

I’d rather be Welsh than English, that’s for sure.

Years later, when I was working as a trolley wally in a supermarket, I tackled the boredom by talking to the customers in as many different accents as I could manage. I started with one that I didn’t think would alert any suspicion – generic Asian – then moved on to Irish, Welsh, Australian and American.

As a Welsh speaker, I’m very conscious of how activism can effect real change.

After Zorro, people spoke Spanish to me for ages. I’m Welsh but that movie instantly gave me a new ethnicity.

I regret not paying a bit more attention to Welsh lessons at school. My Welsh is pretty ropey, as back at my school, people didn’t take Welsh lessons seriously. My dad can speak it, so I wish he’d taught me some growing up.

My mum, Olwen, was a bright and talkative woman who loved a gossip and a story and was given slightly to malapropisms. And she was Welsh, so, of course, she sang.

I do what I can, but I’ll always give it a shot. You’re not going to see me playing a Welsh character any time soon, not because I wouldn’t love to. I went up to Wales once and read for a film with Rhys Ifans, and haven’t been asked back since. We did have a nice time on the train on the way back.

The career I have had should warrant me getting a job. I’ve done all the badges. I’m doing my coaching badges with the Welsh FA.

I like the Stereophonics. I know the lead singer, Kelly Jones, and there’s the Welsh connection.

Welsh is my mother tongue, and my children speak it. If you come and live in this community you’ll work out pretty quickly that it’s beneficial to learn the language, because if you’re going to the pub or a cafe you need to be a part of the local life.

You can get this feeling of the English or Scottish or Irish or Welsh fairy, but it is by nature very elusive. It would be possible to pin down a German fairy, but the English one just vanishes, becomes the shadow under the trees.

I’ve done my coaching badges, I’ve got my Pro Licence, but I enjoy what I’m doing now. I’m also the elite performance director of the Welsh FA. The main thing for me was always Liverpool Football Club and my country, Wales – and I’m lucky enough to still be involved with both of them.

I have an American trainer – a bubbly Californian. I tell her, ‘Welsh women don’t run. We’re congenitally incapable.’ But she’s got me up to five kilometers.

When you ask your white friends what their cultural heritage is, they don’t just say white. They give you a math equation. ‘Well, I’m a third German and a fourth Irish and one-sixteenth Welsh and one-fortieth Native American for college applications.’

Everyone I know is fervently proud to be Welsh but you try not to be preachy about it. It’s difficult at times. But when I go home to north Wales, or to somewhere I’ve never been in south Wales, I still feel at home because I’m in Wales. It’s hard to explain.

The history of the Welsh, the Irish, the Highlanders, is just the same as that of the Gauls, one of internecine feud, no political cohesion, no capacity for merging private interests, forgetting private grudges for a patriotic cause.

Welsh rugby has done its dirty washing in public. It’s nothing new. We’re a tribal bunch. If warring parties want to sway public opinion, they do it in the public arena.

I always speak Welsh to my family.

For me as a Welsh actor, Richard Burton is one of my biggest idols. And I’ve got so many: Peter O’Toole, Laurence Olivier and Oliver Reed. If they got ‘Hunky Dory’ and ‘Citadel’ offered to them, they would do completely different jobs on both of them.

My mother was Welsh and I loved going to Wales every summer, where Uncle Les had a farm. My mother had seven brothers and a sister and they were all very close. There would always be food on the table and uncles coming in and out. My father’s family were English and lived in London, and we didn’t really see them.

So many different countries have got their version of what Merlin is: the Scottish say he Scottish, the Welsh say he’s Welsh, the French say he’s French.

My initial impression of the Welsh was that they were grumpier than I was!

In 1977, while I was performing in a play in Cardiff, a friend introduced me to a striking redhead called Myfanwy Talog, famed for her appearances on Welsh television with the comedy duo Rees and Ronnie. We were instantly smitten and eventually moved in together, sharing 18 happy years.

I do think the Welsh have a special enthusiasm for death. My father’s always going to funerals of people he doesn’t know very well.

All my friends are Welsh, I speak Welsh, and I feel very Welsh.

I don’t think I have one particular favourite writer. I have many whose works I will always buy or reread – Muriel Spark, Anthony Powell, Robert Louis Stevenson, Ruth Rendell, James Ellroy, William McIlvanney, Kate Atkinson, John Burnside, Louise Welsh, Iain Banks.

When I was five, my uncle bought us a tape recorder and my dad tried to record us kids talking and singing, stuff like that. There’s really quite a lot of me in a really Welsh accent going, ‘Can I tell a joke? Can I sing a song?’ – really annoying and brattish.

That’s acting for you. ‘White Queen’ has English playing Welsh and vice versa.

I think most of the world would like to be Scottish. All the Americans who come here never look for English blood or Welsh, only for Scottish and Irish. It’s understandable. The Scots effectively created the face of the modern world: the railways, the bridges, the tunnels.

I love my nice things, but I’m still the Welsh family girl.

I got a part in the film ‘Emma’ in which Gwyneth was playing the lead. She was going out with Brad Pitt at the time. I asked her if, with a name like Gwyneth, she had any Welsh connections. She wasn’t terribly friendly.

My grandfather was a Welsh dock-worker who voted Tory. Some of my friends are investment bankers who have voted Labour. It takes all sorts, and the best Tory values appeal to all sorts.

One of my greatest sadnesses at the prospective break-up of the Union is that it will set English, Welsh and Northern Irish against Scots in a bitter division of the debts and resources of the whole of the U.K.

The only thing I can cook is Welsh rarebit.

When I moved to Wales more than twenty years ago and began to research ‘Here Be Dragons,’ I was fascinated from the first by the Welsh medieval laws, by the discovery that women enjoyed a greater status in Wales than elsewhere in Europe.

Welsh women aren’t the most tactile unless they’re your relatives. And then you don’t want them to be.

I grew up watching the Olympics and did some athletics for my school, winning the Welsh pentathlon championship.

I have to give credit to my mum for my music taste. She’s white and Welsh but she listens to dancehall, reggae, Reggaeton.’