C. L. R. James - The Black Jacobins (1938)

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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.

C. L. R. James
In politics all abstract terms conceal treachery.

C. L. R. James
The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.

C. L. R. James
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
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
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
Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment.

C. L. R. James
In revolution, when the ceaseless slow accumulation of centuries bursts into volcanic eruption, the meteoric flares and flights above are a meaningless chaos and lend themselves to infinite caprice and romanticism unless the observer sees them always as projections of the sub-soil from which they came.

C. L. R. James