C. L. R. James Quotes

The grossest thing in our gross national product today is our language. It is suffering from inflation.

In all human affairs there are efforts there are results and the strength of the effort is the measure of the result.

The misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen.

This was a great year for preventive worrying. Seldom in recent history have so many people worried about so many things that didn't happen in the end.

Worry is most apt to ride you ragged not when you are in action but when the day's work is done. Your imagination can run riot then ... your mind is like a motor operating without its load.

Truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne.

The interests of childhood and youth are the interests of mankind.

I loved laughing with him, loved that he could make me laugh.

We have met the Devil of Information Overload and his impish underlings, the computer virus, the busy signal, the dead link, and the PowerPoint presentation.

Who ever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

If your writing doesn't keep you up at night, it won't keep anyone else up either

You have no right to be silenced.

Without the right to defend yourself--and the right to possesss the means to do it--all other supposed rights are so much hot air.

The people of the United States will do anything for Latin America, except read about it.

It’s a great city, Paris, a beautiful city––and––it was very good for me.

To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic.

To me, that's the ultimate isolation - to be separated from my own mind.

Since even the most fastidious among us can rarely escape hearing salacious local gossip, it is as well to enjoy what cannot be avoided.

You’re a tough guy, but I’m a nightmare wrapped in the apocalypse.

Unseen, one summer eve, you kissed me in four places.

The basic principle which I believe has contributed more than any other to the building of our business as it is today, is the ownership of our company by the people employed in it.

In a business, you've got to move on.

I love to write about Nabokov and also to think about him. I love his attitude that he is incomparable, his lofty judgments and general scorn of other writers - not all of them, of course.

I think my attitude has always been to put food on the table.

I really have been lucky because I've always had a very healthy attitude to my body.

Maybe it's just parenthood that puts you in a situation where you just have to develop a new attitude, I guess, about things.

The happy Union of these States is a wonder their Constitution a miracle their example the hope of Liberty throughout the world.

But Hopes are Shy Birds flying at a great distance seldom reached by the best of Guns.

Hope is the anchor of our souls. I know of no one who is not in need of hope - young or old, strong or weak, rich or poor.

Hope against hope, and ask till ye receive.

To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the making of bread.

It's all about respect. I'm not going to treat a woman like a piece of meat.

I adore adverbs they are the only qualifications I really much respect.

I'm a scientist, not a theologian. I don't know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty. Revere and respect Gaia. Have trust in Gaia. But not faith.

Whatever ought to be, can be.

Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.

We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.

At drama school, we were taught to write down your dreams and carry them around in your wallet with you, and they'll come true, but I didn't do that.

The key to humor is often self-loathing or sarcasm. In a sense, that's how self-loathing is made palatable.

If you don't have humor, you're not going to make it. You're going to be one of those people who walks around with your head about to explode.

The key to gallows humor is to make the joke, no matter how certain the gallows is.

Peace is the happy natural state of man war is corruption and disgrace.

Enjoy failure and learn from it. You can never learn from success.

Honesty is about the scars. It's about the blemishes. But it's more than just bragging about failure, which could be a form of ego. It's about truly helping people.

To begin to think with purpose, is to enter the ranks of those strong ones who only recognize failure as one of the pathways to attainment.

The first week in intelligence school, you learn there are only two conditions in life. There is policy success, or there is intel failure. There is no other condition in life.

The success or failure of a life, as far as posterity goes, seems to lie in the more or less luck of seizing the right moment of escape.

I love America more than any other country in this world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

We learn much of parenting from our own parents. My love for my father deepened profoundly when he was kind, patient, and understanding.

That's the thing about Aquaman that's cool is he's not an alien, right? He's from our planet, and he's from a society that we're not privy to in the context of the story.