Top 15 C. L. R. James Quotes

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

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

When I confessed I was angry, even sympathizers balked at this.According to the code, anger should not intrude into cricket. I understood them well, I had been as foolish in my time. According to the colonial version of the code, you were to show yourself a 'true sport' by not making a fuss about the most barefaced discrimination because it was't cricket. Not me any longer. To that I had said, was saying, my final good-bye.

It is an historical commonplace that social explosions take place when most of the fundamental causes of dissatisfaction have been removed and only a few remain. This is the result of a feeling of power.

Cricket is an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community. (...) Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belong with the theatre, ballet, opera and dance.

Dickens saw Victorian England always with the eyres of a pre-Victorian. His ideal England was the England of Hazlitt and of Pickwick.

The Greeks believed that an athlete who had represented his community at a national competition, and won, had thereby conferred a notable distinction on his city. His victory was a testament to the quality of the citizens. All the magnates of the city welcomed him home in civic procession. They broke down a part of the wall for him to enter: a city which could produce such citizens had no need of walls to defend it. For the rest of his life he ate at the public expense.

The first recorded date in European history is 776 B.C., the date of the first Olympic Games.

I could, of course, wait for the Conservative Party or the Labour Party to organise a sample poll. A poll on art. A sample poll! A sample poll can investigate only what the pollsters know, and it cannot do even that properly.

Trotsky had said that the workers were deflected from politics by sports. With my past I simply could not accept that. I was British and the history of those decades in Britain was very familiar to me, both the politics and the sport. The organisational drive for sport had come from Britain.

I do not want to get liberated from them [memories of racialism]. I would consider liberation from them a grievous loss, irreparable.

Here, on the cricket field if nowhere else, all men in the island are equal, and we are the best men in the island.

So it was that I became one of those dark men whose 'surest sign of ... having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself'.

The people most affected by this are people of the middle class who, lacking the hard contact with realities of the masses and unable to attain to the freedoms of a leisured class, are more than all types of people given to trivial divisions and subdivisions of social rank and precedence.

These are no random reminiscences. ... The Negroid population of the West Indies is composed of a large percentage of actually black people. ... Then there are the browns, intermediates, who cannot by any stretch of imagination pass as white, but who will not go one inch towards mixing with people darker than themselves.