C. L. R. James Quotes
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First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle.
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The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.
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I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense.
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It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.
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Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.
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The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people.
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The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known.
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The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.
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I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist.
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Why are you chasing your tail so?" Said the kitten, "I have learned that the best thing for a cat is happiness, and that happiness is my tail. Therefore, I am chasing it: and when I catch it. I shall have happiness." Said the cat, "My son, I, too, have paid attention to the problems of the universe. I, too, have judged that happiness is in my tail. But, I have noticed that whenever I chase it, it keeps running away from me, and when I go about my business, it just seems to come after me wherever I go.
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In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism.
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Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.
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I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking.
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It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany was defeated.
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It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.
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Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.
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All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market.
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The struggle for socialism is the struggle for proletarian (working class) democracy. Proletarian democracy is not the crown of socialism. Socialism is the result of proletarian democracy. To the degree that the proletariat mobilizes itself and the great masses of the people, the socialist revolution is advanced. The proletariat mobilizes itself as a self-acting force through its own committees, unions, parties, and other organizations.
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It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.
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The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.
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If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.
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I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.
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Property-owners are the most energetic flag-waggers and patriots in every country, but only so long as they enjoy their possessions: to safeguard those they desert God, King and Country in a twinkling.
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An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.
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There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.
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The cruelties of property and privilege are always more ferocious than the revenges of poverty and oppression. For the one aims at perpetuating resented injustice, the other is merely a momentary passion soon appeased.
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All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca.
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My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas.
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This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.
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After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government.
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