Top 50 Brendan Behan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “If you accept your limitations you go beyond them.”

— Brendan Behan

2. “I’m a drinker with a writing problem.”

— Brendan Behan

3. “It’s not that the Irish are cynical. It’s rather that they have a wonderful lack of respect for everything and everybody.”

— Brendan Behan

4. “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how it’s done, they’ve seen it done every day, but they’re unable to do it themselves.”

— Brendan Behan

5. “They took away our land, our language, and our religion; but they could never harness our tongues...”

— Brendan Behan

6. “One drink is to many for me and a thousand not enough.”

— Brendan Behan

7. “I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.”

— Brendan Behan

8. “There is no human situation so miserable that it cannot be made worse by the presence of a policeman.”

— Brendan Behan

9. “Every cripple has his own way of walking.”

— Brendan Behan

10. “I saw a notice that said “Drink Canada Dry” and I’ve just started.”

— Brendan Behan

11. “I only take a drink on two occasions – when I’m thirsty and when I’m not.”

— Brendan Behan

12. “I saw a sign that said ‘Drink Canada Dry’. So I did.”

— Brendan Behan

13. “To get enough to eat was regarded as an achievement. To get drunk was a victory.”

— Brendan Behan

14. “An author’s first duty is to let down his country.”

— Brendan Behan

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

15. “Message? What the hell do you think I am, a bloody postman?”

— Brendan Behan

16. “The sun was in mind to come out but having a look at the weather it was in lost heart and went back again.”

— Brendan Behan

17. “I ruined my health drinking to other people’s.”

— Brendan Behan

18. “It is a good deed to forget a poor joke.”

— Brendan Behan

19. “A pedestrian ought to be legally allowed to toss at least one hand grenade at a motorist every day.”

— Brendan Behan

20. “Pound notes are the best religion in the world.”

— Brendan Behan

21. “The terrorist is the one with the small bomb.”

— Brendan Behan

22. “I think weddings are sadder than funerals, because they remind you of your own wedding. You can’t be reminded of your own funeral because it hasn’t happened. But weddings always make me cry.”

— Brendan Behan

23. “I’m a Communist by day and a Catholic as soon as it gets dark.”

— Brendan Behan

24. “There’s no bad publicity except an obituary.”

— Brendan Behan

25. “Bless you, sister. May all your sons be Bishops.”

— Brendan Behan

26. “Other people’s interruptions of your work are relatively insignificant compared with the countless times you interrupt yourself.”

— Brendan Behan

27. “When I’m talking to people I like to stop and quote myself. My quotes have a way of spicing up conversation.”

— Brendan Behan

28. “That you, sister. May you be the mother of a bishop.”

— Brendan Behan

29. “Whatever you hold in contempt is your jailer.”

— Brendan Behan

30. “The only thing I envy in young people is their livers.”

— Brendan Behan

31. “You made one mistake. You married me.”

— Brendan Behan

32. “God forgive us-but most of us grew up to be the sort of men our mothers warned us against.”

— Brendan Behan

33. “Failure at a task may be the result of having tackled it at the wrong time.”

— Brendan Behan

34. “I am married to Beatrice Salkeld, a painter. We have no children, except me.”

— Brendan Behan

35. “I am a daylight atheist.”

— Brendan Behan

36. “Most horror movies are certainly that.”

— Brendan Behan

37. “When two men fight over a woman it’s the fight they want, not the woman.”

— Brendan Behan

38. “Many a man has decided to stay alive not because of the will to live but because of the determination not to give assorted surviving bastards the satisfaction of his death.”

— Brendan Behan

39. “There’s no one, no one, loves you like yourself.”

— Brendan Behan

40. “In a society which really supported marriage the wife would be encouraged to go to the office and make love to her husband on the company’s time and with its blessing.”

— Brendan Behan

41. “Nothing hurts more than the friendly letter that one never got around to writing.”

— Brendan Behan

42. “I never felt so much at home as I do in New York. I must be a devil.”

— Brendan Behan

43. “No man can discover his own talents.”

— Brendan Behan

44. “The English and Americans dislike only some Irish – the same Irish that the Irish themselves detest, Irish writers – the ones that think.”

— Brendan Behan

45. “Prostitutes, more than any other profession, help keep American marriages together.”

— Brendan Behan

46. “Compliments pass when the quality meet.”

— Brendan Behan

47. “A man is fortunate if he encounters living examples of vice, as well as of virtue, to inspire him.”

— Brendan Behan

48. “What’s a crook, only a businessman without a shop.”

— Brendan Behan

49. “Scream at God if that’s the only thing that will get results.”

— Brendan Behan

50. “Ninety-seven saint days a year wouldn’t affect the theater, but two Yom Kippurs would ruin it.”

— Brendan Behan