John Boyle O'Reilly Quotes

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.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

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.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

It has always been the aim of royalty and aristocracy to lower the individual liberty and independence of the common people. A baron and a minute-man could not breathe the same air.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

Prize-Fighting is not the aim of boxing. This noble exercise ought not to be judged by the dishonesty or the low lives of too many of its professional followers. Let it stand alone, an athletic practice, on the same footing as boating or football.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

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have arrived; and the union with England, which shall then have cursed Ireland for nine tenths of a century, will be repealed.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

The success of the suffrage movement would injure women spiritually and intellectually, for they would be assuming a burden though they knew themselves unable to bear it. It is the sediment, not the wave, of a sex. It is the antithesis of that highest and sweetest mystery - conviction by submission, and conquest by sacrifice.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

The adoption of gloves for all contests will do more to preserve the practice of boxing than any other conceivable means. It will give pugilism new life, not only as a professional boxer's art, but as a general exercise.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

Women ought to be fully guarded by law in all rights of property, labor, profession, etc.; but, roughly stated, the voting population ought to represent the fighting population.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

Women are at once the guardians and the well-spring of the world's faith, morality, and tenderness; and if ever they are degraded to a commonplace level with men, this fine essential quality will be impaired, and their weakness will have to beg and follow where now it guides and controls.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

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.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

With the advent of chivalry, the art of boxing waned. The evolution of feudal aristocracy, with other and widely different exercises, pastimes and weapons from those of the common people, made boxing unfashionable.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

Every boy in a free country ought to be instructed in boxing, wrestling, and the use of weapons. Every young man ought to be drilled. Every householder ought, at least, to have a right to own a rifle, and should know how to make cartridges.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

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

- John Boyle O'Reilly

All that is worth seeing in good boxing can best be witnessed in a contest with soft gloves. Every value is called out: quickness, force, precision, foresight, readiness, pluck, and endurance. With these, the rowdy and 'rough' are not satisfied.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

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.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

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.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

The right word fitly spoken is a precious rarity.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

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.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

Be true to your work, your word, and your friend.

- John Boyle O'Reilly

No writer for the press, however humble, is free from the burden of keeping his purpose high and his integrity white.

- John Boyle O'Reilly