Top 30 C. L. R. James Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.”

— C. L. R. James

2. “The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.”

— C. L. R. James

3. “It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany was defeated.”

— C. L. R. James

4. “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.”

— C. L. R. James

5. “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.”

— C. L. R. James

6. “I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense.”

— C. L. R. James

7. “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.”

— C. L. R. James

8. “When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.”

— C. L. R. James

9. “Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.”

— C. L. R. James

10. “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.”

— C. L. R. James

11. “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.”

— C. L. R. James

12. “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.”

— C. L. R. James

13. “Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.”

— C. L. R. James

14. “If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.”

— C. L. R. James

15. “The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage.”

— C. L. R. James

16. “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.”

— C. L. R. James

17. “The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848.”

— C. L. R. James

18. “In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital.”

— C. L. R. James

19. “Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change.”

— C. L. R. James

20. “An army is a miniature of the society which produces it.”

— C. L. R. James

21. “The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation.”

— C. L. R. James

22. “All peoples are entangled in the net of the world market.”

— C. L. R. James

23. “There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.”

— C. L. R. James

24. “All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca.”

— C. L. R. James

25. “Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.”

— C. L. R. James

26. “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.”

— C. L. R. James

27. “It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear.”

— C. L. R. James

28. “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.”

— C. L. R. James

29. “The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known.”

— C. L. R. James

30. “Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships.”

— C. L. R. James

31. “First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle.”

— C. L. R. James

32. “The late development of mass industrial organization in the United States has both stimulated and retarded the political development of the American working class.”

— C. L. R. James

33. “I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation.”

— C. L. R. James

34. “One of the surest signs of the estimated changes in the consciousness of the American proletariat is to be found in the character of the demands now being put forward by the leadership.”

— C. L. R. James