Daily Inspiration Quote by Brendan Behan

Behan’s line flatters the Irish by refusing to flatter them. He starts with the obvious label outsiders love to pin on Irish talk - “cynical” - then swerves into something more affectionate and more dangerous: a “lack of respect.” The pivot is the trick. Cynicism is a posture, a sour little philosophy that assumes the worst. Behan suggests the Irish mood is closer to democratic irreverence: not despairing at the world, but refusing to kneel before it.

“Wonderful” does sly work here. It’s praise, but also a wink that admits the trait can be corrosive. The phrase “everything and everybody” is deliberately excessive, a comic overreach that signals he’s not writing an anthropology report; he’s mythmaking in miniature. He’s packaging a national persona built from pub wit, street skepticism, and a long history of being governed, judged, and sermonized at by institutions that demanded reverence: empire, church, class hierarchy, respectability itself.

The subtext is political as much as cultural. In a country where deference was often demanded as a condition of survival, disrespect becomes a kind of freedom practice - a way to puncture pomp and keep authority from becoming sacred. It also lets Behan defend bluntness and mockery as virtues rather than symptoms. If you don’t respect “everything and everybody,” you can still be humane; you’re just harder to domesticate. That’s Behan’s real boast: not that the Irish are gloomy, but that they’re immunized against the sanctimonious.