C. L. R. James Quotes

A man who looks like Frodo just spent $150 on erotica books and asked for my phone number. I considered giving him yours just to spite you.

And here I was, left with only myself to deal with. It was entirely up to me.

The power to define the other seals one's definition of oneself.

As Gates had told the pastor that day in his house. "I can do anything I put my mind to".

People always seem to band together in accordance to a principle that has nothing to do with love, a principle that releases them from personal responsibility. (p. 81)

Time to improve is limited. The clock is always on and doesn't care if you don't feel like it. Someone else does and they're passing you by.

I'm not concerned with whether you got to the top. I want to know how far you climbed. That is where the real achievement is found.

Never underestimate the capacity of people to choose the easy way.

When making the problem go away is more important than solving the problem leadership begins to fail. The easy way vs. The character way.

The measure of your character and mental toughness is the space between what you are doing and what you could be doing

Put character and mental toughness before execution and you will get consistent execution.

It was one thing to stay in one place If you were happy and fulfilled- that was simply living the good life. But what if you weren't fulfilled?

Much of what we call evil can often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight

Sin is the only heritage of the natural man...

I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.

The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.

You are going to get over it sooner or later so get over it now.

We live in a nation of pigs and murderers.

...they ain't never met nobody they didn't lie to and steal from.

The price of greatness is responsibilty.

Change often brings unimagined opportunity...If there is no struggle, there is no progress. To live in a safe cocoon- I believe that is not truly living. It is stagnation.

If you know from whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations on where you can go.

Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but, most of all, endurance.

All religions and spiritual traditions begin with the cry "Help!

You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too early. We cannot be free until they are free.

I do a lot of rewriting. It’s very painful.

The greatest discovery of our generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. As you think, so shall you be.

We held each other so close that we might indeed have been one body.

Acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequence of any misfortune.

Nothing is more desirable than to be released from an affliction but nothing is more frightening than to be divested of a crutch.

Be willing to have it so acceptance of what has happened is the first step to overcoming the consequences of any misfortune.

Men habitually use only a small part of the powers which they possess and which they might use under appropriate circumstances.

Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.

All art is a kind of confession more or less oblique. All artists if they are to survive are forced at last to tell the whole story to vomit the anguish up.

Man lives by habits indeed but what he lives for is thrill and excitements. ... From time immemorial war has been ... the supremely thrilling excitement.

Children have never been very good at listening to their elders but they have never failed to imitate them.

When you have to make a choice and don't make it that is in itself a choice.

Experience which destroys innocence also leads one back to it.

Faith is one of the forces by which men live the total absence of it means collapse.

The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy provided those ways do not assume to interfere with ours.

Genius in truth means little more than the faculty of perceiving in an unhabitual way.

Action may not always bring happiness but there is no happiness without action.

The emotions are not always subject to reason ... but they are always subject to action. When thoughts do not neutralize an undesirable emotion action will.

The God of many men is little more than their court of appeal against the damnatory judgement passed on their failures by the opinion of the world.

An idea to be suggestive must come to the individual with the force of a revelation.

Every time a resolve or fine glow of feeling evaporates without bearing fruit it is worse than a chance lost it works to hinder future emotions from taking the normal path of discharge.

Impulse without reason is not enough and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.

Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways of conceiving cases and opposite conclusions prompted by our instinctive perception of them.

The thinker philosophizes as the lover loves. Even were the consequences not only useless but harmful he must obey his impulse.

This world is white no longer and it will never be white again.