text:
Curb Your Enthusiasm

Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-2024) is an American television sitcom on HBO starring Seinfeld writer & co-creator Larry David. The series is loosely based on David's life as a semi-retired multi-millionaire in the world after Seinfeld. It was inspired by a 1999 one-hour mockumentary titled Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, which David and HBO had envisioned as a one-time project.

Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm

 * Larry David: One thing I admire about Hitler - he never took any shit from magicians. [...] [imitating Hitler] Where is the rabbit?  Show me the rabbit!

 * Cheryl: That wasn't nice of him to say that but here's this guy trying to get a job and what have you done?
 * Larry: What have I done? I haven't done anything. I was insulted, don't you see that?
 * Cheryl: Are you going to write him a letter now or something?
 * Larry: Write him a letter.."Dear prick, I'm sorry you're a prick."
 * Cheryl: Okay, that's not gonna help..
 * Larry: "I didn't know you were such a prick when I called.."
 * Cheryl: Okay-
 * Larry: "..but it really turned out that you were! In any event, would you please give this young man a job?"

 * Larry: Who do you think has more freedom: the married man in America or the single man in Communist China?

Seasons

 * Season 1
 * Season 2
 * Season 3
 * Season 4
 * Season 5
 * Season 6
 * Season 7
 * Season 8
 * Season 9

Cast

 * Larry David - Larry David
 * Cheryl Hines - Cheryl David
 * Jeff Garlin - Jeff Greene
 * Susie Essman - Susie Greene

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Curb Your Enthusiasm


text:
Talk:Ferdinand Marcos

analysis of the speech

Unsourced
Wikiquote no longer allows unsourced quotations, and they are in process of being removed from our pages (see Wikiquote:Limits on quotations); but if you can provide a reliable, precise and verifiable source for any quote on this list please move it to Ferdinand Marcos. --Antiquary 17:57, 9 September 2009 (UTC)

 * Leadership is the other side of the coin of loneliness, and he who is a leader must always act alone. And in acting alone, accept everything alone.

 * There are many things we do not want in this world. Let us not just mourn them; let us change them.

 * If you find it, we'll split it.

title: Talk:Ferdinand Marcos


text:
Moshe Safdie

Moshe Safdie (born July 14, 1938) is an Israeli-Canadian architect.

Quotes

 * When I got my first commission after Habitat, for a few weeks I couldn't draw."
 * CBC television interview, used for many years in CBC Montreal's sign-on montage

 * Architecture is not about building the impossible, which we can do if we have enough money and enough tools and enough computers, it is about building what is appropriate and about attaining beauty through such an approach. I describe this premise as "inherent buildability and I believe it is central to what I do.
 * from lecture Megascale, Order and Complexity held in Emmertal, Germany on July 27, 2008

Form and Purpose (1982):
He who seeks Truth Shall find Beauty

He who seeks Beauty Shall find Vanity

He who seeks Order Shall find Gratification

He who seeks Gratification Shall be Disappointed

He who considers himself as the servant of his fellow being Shall find the joy of Self-Expression

He who seeks Self-Expression Shall fall into the pit of Arrogance

Arrogance is incompatible with nature Thru the nature of the universe and the nature of man we shall seek Truth

If we seek truth we shall find Beauty

title: Moshe Safdie


text:
Cricket

Cricket is a bat-and-ball sport contested by two teams, usually of eleven players each, which is played in over 100 countries.

A

 * Of all the races in the Galaxy, only the English could possibly revive the memory of the most horrific wars ever to sunder the Universe and transform it into what I'm afraid is generally regarded as an incomprehensibly dull and pointless game.
 * Douglas Adams, Life the Universe and Everything (1982)

B

 * In Affectionate Remembrance of ENGLISH CRICKET, which died at the Oval on 29th AUGUST, 1882, Deeply lamented by a large circle of sorrowing friends and acquaintances R.I.P. N.B. - The body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia.
 * Reginald Shirley Brooks, published in The Sporting Times (1882)
 * See Wikipedia on The Ashes

 * I think sledging is healthy for the game. I don't really call it sledging -- at the end of the day it is gamesmanship. What you are trying to do is put the opposition off their game.
 * Andy Bichel former world cup winner with Austraila

 * He is the below average cricketer, and there are many of him. But he is more important to the game than the most eminent test player or the most authoritative administrator too. Without him, the game would not survive, because it would be meaningless.
 * Dick Brittenden, Postscript to New Zealand Cricketers (1961)

 * After years of patient study (and with cricket there can be no other kind), I have decided that there is nothing wrong with the game that the introduction of golf carts wouldn't fix in a hurry.
 * Bill Bryson, Down Under (2000)

 * It is not true that the English invented cricket as a way of making all other human endeavours look interesting and lively; that was merely an unintended side effect. I don't wish to denigrate a sport that is enjoyed by millions, some of them awake and facing the right way, but it is an odd game.
 * Bill Bryson, Down Under (2000)

 * I am quite certain that if the rest of the world vanished overnight and the development of cricket was left in Australian hands, within a generation the players would be wearing shorts and using the bats to hit each other. And the thing is, it would be a much better game for it.
 * Bill Bryson, Down Under (2000)

D

 * What is human life but a game of cricket?
 * 3rd Duke of Dorchester, Ladies and Gentlemens Magazine (1777)

F

 * [T]hroughout the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, the English have gradually lost their political control over the game. The most significant development being how the International Cricket Council’s (ICC) headquarters have relocated from Lord’s to Dubai. The importance of this relocation, not only concerns the decline of England as a political power, both literally and symbolically, but also the rise of so-called lesser nations, such as India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the governance of world cricket affairs. The global success of the IPL is another case in point. Given the IPL’s global appeal and the unprecedented level of interest in cricket in India, many now believe India represents the game’s political and financial epicenter. The rapid rise of nations from the Indian subcontinent as cricketing superpowers has arguably contributed to the emergence of a series of more confident ethnic identities amongst the British Asian diaspora. Many of the Asian respondents in this research, for instance, expressed delight that the baton of power had moved from England to the Indian subcontinent. Though it should be noted that, as all the Asian respondents in this research were of Pakistani descent, many were not necessarily of the fact that it is India and not Pakistan that has developed the lion’s share of power.
 * Thomas Fletcher, “The making of English cricket cultures: Empire, globalisation and (post) colonialism Paper”, Sport in Societ, p. 9.

 * Nandy’s challenge to the view of cricket being the quintessential English game goes some way to dispute the idea that cricket was merely handed down by the British and compliantly absorbed by the local inhabitants of Empire. This idea was supported by a number of the Asian respondents. Ali, for instance, told me that, for him, cricket would always be more Pakistani than English because of the importance of cricket within Pakistani culture. Similarly, Aylesworth’s Jimmy argued that football was the national sport in England and thus, as Pakistanis offer unrivaled enthusiasm for cricket, they should have the right to claim it as theirs: ‘You guys [English] don’t even like cricket. You’re all into your football. In Pakistan, the only thing that matters is cricket. Twenty four hours a day, cricket. You can have your football, but cricket is ours.’
 * Thomas Fletcher, “The making of English cricket cultures: Empire, globalisation and (post) colonialism Paper”, Sport in Society, p. 13.

 * The core elements of rule of law discourse which are so deeply embedded in cricket as a practice became basic normative references for opponents of the imperial master and the hypocrisies and contradictions of colonial rule. The role of cricket in the former English colonies demonstrates most clearly its contradictory character and its dialectical potential as a text which can and does provide a utopian vision for the future of the interpretive community. Cricket is both an imperial Victorian game and the 'national' game of India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, the West Indies, Bangladesh and Australia. 'Each of the interpretations is true and each has the capacity to serve as the basis of a myth. The interpreter has to choose. At this level, at least, cricket far outstrips law as an important national social artefact.
 * David Fraser, “Cricket and the Law: The Man in White is Always Right”, (2005), p. 327

 * One more aspect of the cultural heritage of the interpretive community of cricket (at least in the West Indies, South Africa, New Zealand)], and [[England) is the historical 'fact' of the link between cricket and both the traditional values of Christianity and the emerging Victorian ideological practice of muscular Christianity in the English public schools and the tradition of imperialistic missionaries. The Protestant ethic which informed Victorian social and legal practices and norms permeated cricket as well. Erich Geldbach goes so far as to propose a Weberian analysis positing the theory that: Both the socio-economic...system of capitalism and modern athletics can be traced back to the setting of ascetic Protestantism which acted as a 'cultural catalyst' to bring about modern capitalism and modern sport. Whatever the final resolution of the Weberian and anti-Weberian chicken and egg debate about Protestantism and capitalism, it is quite clear from out understanding and knowledge of the game that there are obvious parallels between the ethical content of the 'spirit of the game' and certain popular versions of Christian morality. 'It's not cricket' resonates as condemningly as does 'It's not the Christian thing to do', in what many continue to assert are 'our' moral practices.
 * David Fraser, “Cricket and the Law: The Man in White is Always Right”, (2005), p. 332

 * Despite the obvious historical and ideological unity of cricket and imperial Christianity, we are faced here again with competing versions of the truth. If such a connection really exists, why did it take Knott's conversion to illustrate for him the error of his ways? Why were the imprecations of those who condemned the events in question as violations of the moral code of cricket ineffective? Does this indicate that there is a conflict or that while there may be a practical conjunction one can heed the code only when its source is not human law but God's Law? Can only Christians be true cricketers? Can true cricketers be non-Christians? In the Indian context, can only Hindus be 'Indian' cricketers? What are we to make of the 'Islamic' nature of Pakistan and Pakistani cricket and Yusef Youhana, a Christian Test player? The debates over natural law versus human positivism are as central to the understanding of Noonan's jurisprudence as they are to the understanding of cricket. There are, of course, counter-Christian narratives or different Christian narratives in cricket which contradict and enrich the story just as there both secular and competing Hindu or Islamic renderings of the complex texts and practices of Indiana and Pakistani cricket. A triumph over one narrow view of Christianity served to 'democratize' the game permitting the playing of the game on Sundays in England by melding capitalism and anti-Puritanism in an interesting and textually complex Weberian interpretive ploy.
 * David Fraser, “Cricket and the Law: The Man in White is Always Right”, (2005), p. 333

G

 * Anyone who really plays well at cricket will never give attention to lawn tennis. The monotony of the game will choke him off.
 * Spencer Gore, first Wimbledon champion, quoted in Stephen Chalke, Through the Remembered Gate (2019), p. 142

H

 * If I knew I was going to die today, I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.
 * G. H. Hardy, quoted in The Joy of Cricket (ed. John Bright-Holmes, 1984)

 * That cricket is going to stay in India there cannot be a shadow of a doubt; it has taken hold all over the country, and chokras can be seen playing in every village with any sort of old bat and ball that they can lay hands on. I should hope that it will do something to get over any racial antipathy; for instance, it must, I think, bring the several races together more and more, in a spirit of harmony that should be the spirit in which cricket is played. Unquestionably, it arouses excitement and enthusiasm, and extreme ambition that one's own side should succeed, but it also ought to lead to friendliness, and that is what is needed in India. East will always be East, and West, West, but the crease is not a very broad line of demarcation – so narrow, indeed, that it ought to help bring about friendly relations.
 * Lord Harris, A Few Short Runs (1921)

 * I was brought up to believe that cricket is the most important activity in men's lives, the most important thread in the fabric of the cosmos.
 * Bernard Hollowood, Cricket on the Brain (1970)

 * Before we were old enough to practise at the nets with the Burslem men, we played most of our cricket on waste land that had been trampled flat by the clogs and boots of generations of miners.
 * Bernard Hollowood, Cricket on the Brain (1970)

 * The true charm of cricket and hunting is that they are still more or less sociable and universal—there's a place for every man who will come and take his part.
 * Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown's School Days (1857)

I

 * There is a consensus of expert opinion that cricket may have been invented during Saxon or Norman times by children living in the Weald, an area of dense woodlands and clearings in south-east England. The first reference to cricket being played as an adult sport was in 1611, and in the same year, a dictionary defined cricket as a boys' game. There is also the thought that cricket may have derived from bowls, by the intervention of a batsman trying to stop the ball from reaching its target by hitting it away. Village cricket had developed by the middle of the 17th century and the first English “county teams” were formed in the second half of the century, as “local experts” from village cricket were employed as the earliest professionals. The first known game in which the teams use county names is in 1709. In the first half of the 18th Century cricket established itself as a leading sport in London and the south-eastern counties of England. Its spread was limited by the constraints of travel, but it was slowly gaining popularity in other parts of England and Women’s Cricket dates back to the 1745, when the first known match was played in Surrey. In 1744, the first Laws of Cricket were written and subsequently amended in 1774, when innovations such as lbw, a 3rd stump, - the middle stump and a maximum bat width were added. The codes were drawn up by the “Star and Garter Club” whose members ultimately founded the famous Marylebone Cricket Club at Lord's in 1787. MCC immediately became the custodian of the Laws and has made revisions ever since then to the current day.
 * ICC, History of Cricket, "Early Cricket Pre 1799".

 * Paraphrasing [Carl von] Clausewitz, it seems that in Pakistan cricket is now becoming [Islamic] religious propaganda by other means.
 * Massimo Introvigne, "Cricket and Religious Propaganda: An Unholy Alliance in Pakistan", Bitter Winter (November 18, 2023)

J

 * Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn.
 * C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963)

 * There is so much uncertainty in cricket. One day you can get a hundred, the next day you can be dismissed for a zero. It makes you become practical about things. Teaches you to accept both success and failure. I think I have learnt a lot about life from cricket.
 * Mahela Jayawardene, quoted in S. Dinakar, "I have learnt a lot about life from cricket," Sport Star, vol. 24, no. 38

L

 * How to explain the fascination that cricket exerts? It is not simple. That it should attract the proficient is understandable, although they are liable to continual mischances and mortifications such as no other game presents; but the curious thing is that it attracts the incompetents as well; those who never make a run, and cannot bowl, and yet, doomed only to dreary waiting in the pavilion and to fatiguing fielding, turn up punctually on every occasion, hoping for the best, and even (such is the human heart's buoyancy) expecting it. There is no other game at which the confirmed duffer is so persistent and undepressed. It is for the experts, victims of misfortune, that depression waits; it is they who chew the cud of bitterness.
 * E. V. Lucas, "The English Game", in Cricket All His Life (1950)

M

 * When's the game itself going to begin?
 * Groucho Marx, watching a match at Lord's, attributed in Colin Jarman, The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

 * Cricket can stand up to sustained contemplation on other than statistical or merely sensational levels, and return to the careful and sympathetic watcher some reward more enduring than the fun of a good game would seem to promise or warrant.
 * Ronald Mason, Batsman's Paradise (1955), chapter 1.

 * If this game and its incidents were continually hoisting the spectators breathlessly half out of their seats it would soon be found unnecessary to provide seats at all and the atmosphere would become superficially (and, I think also, essentially) indistinguishable from Highbury on a damp Saturday afternoon in November.
 * Ronald Mason, Batsman's Paradise (1955), chapter 1.

 * It is this seminal simplicity of rhythm, expressed in its curious ritual form, that is at the heart of cricket's peculiar attraction. The tempo of the rhythm, against which all non-cricketers so persistently rail, provides the element of hypnotism necessary to the charm, like the tick of a grandfather clock in a quiet room.
 * Ronald Mason, Batsman's Paradise (1955), chapter 1.

 * Cricket was first recorded in 16th-century England, and it was played in grammar schools, farm communities and everywhere in between. But things really took off when 18th-century nobles realised that not only was it a great sport but also an excellent opportunity for betting. With sky-high stakes being wagered, it was deemed necessary to come up with agreed rules. The oldest surviving set of cricket laws date from 1744 – printed on a handkerchief, naturally. It's now in the MCC Museum at Lord’s in London. The oldest permanent fixture is the annual Eton v Harrow match, played since 1805. A young Lord Byron turned out for Harrow in the first match, though history doesn't record how poetic – or “mad, bad and dangerous” – his bowling was. The first international match was in 1877 when Australia beat England in Melbourne. The match was dubbed a “Test”, since the gruelling nature of playing over five days was deemed the ultimate “test” for any side.
 * Norman Miller, "Very Brief History of Cricket", The Telegraph, (17 June 2016).

 * Cricket civilises people and creates good gentlemen. I want everyone to play cricket in Zimbabwe; I want ours to be a nation of gentlemen.
 * Robert Mugabe, attributed in Helen Exley, Cricket Quotations (1992)

P

 * It is hard to tell where the MCC ends and the Church of England begins.
 * J. B. Priestley in The New Statesman, July 20, 1962, p. 7.

 * In spite of recent jazzed-up one-day matches, cricket to be fully appreciated demands leisure, some sunny warm days and an understanding of its finer points.
 * J. B. Priestley in The English (1973)

 * If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?
 * Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, as quoted in "48 of Prince Philip's greatest gaffes and funny moments", The Telegraph (2 August 2017)

 * Sledgers try and put you off but the way I look at it, people who sledge probably aren't at the top of their game so they have to try and use underhand methods to put you off your stride.
 * Liam Plunkett - Durham & England fast bowler 2nd Nov 2006

R

 * Cricket is desecrated by futile levity, but elevated by a certain high-spirited detachment: between the extremes of indifference and over-anxiety there lies a proper mean.
 * R. C. Robertson-Glasgow, "Envoi", in The Brighter Side of Cricket (1950)

 * Cricket is not so much a game as an extension of being English: a gallimaufry of paradoxes, contradictions, frightening logic and sheer impossibilities, of gentle courtesy and rough violence.
 * Rowland Ryder in Cricket Calling (1995), p. 19.

S

 * Sledging is not required in cricket. It's not good for the game, cricket is a gentleman's game, not a contact sport. We don't see why there should be any abusive language at all.
 * Niranjan Shah of the BCCI (Board of Cricket Control in India) thinks that it should be abolished.
 * Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended.
 * George Bernard Shaw, attributed in Colin Jarman, The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).
 * George Bernard Shaw, attributed in Colin Jarman, The Guinness Dictionary of Sports Quotations (1990).

T

 * I think once it broaches personal issues and once it sort of supersedes your moral boundaries of what language is tolerable, and also when it sort of gets a bit mundane and boring to the point of just going on all the time.
 * Simon Taufel, cricketing umpire, on preventing sledging turning ugly.

 * Village cricket spread fast through the land. In those days, before it became scientific, cricket was the best game in the world to watch, with its rapid sequence of amusing incidents, each ball a potential crisis! Squire, farmer, blacksmith and labourer, with their women and children come to see the fun, were at ease together and happy all the summer afternoon. If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.
 * G. M. Trevelyan, English Social History (1942), ch. 8., on the 18th century.

W

 * Today, many Americans dismiss cricket as an elitist game played by girlie-men. That may be because the game is superficially slow. Or because the players still tend to dress in traditional whites and, during four-day international matches, break for tea. Or maybe it's because, in a sporting world that seems to have turned increasingly nasty, the game's code of sportsmanship remains rectitudinously strict. (The recent unpleasantness during Pakistan's tour of England—an umpire ruled that Pakistan had doctored the ball; Pakistan staged an after-tea protest; the umpires declared the game a forfeit—set off a crisis that made baseball's steroids scandal seem subdued.) But in most of the former Commonwealth, cricket is a game of the masses. This is especially true in cricket-mad South Asia, where last year's match between India and Pakistan was hailed as a sign of warming in the chilly relationship between the two countries (until, that is, India suggested it would side against Pakistan in the ball-scuffing affair). And most cricketers would argue that the game is far more dynamic, and dangerous, than baseball. For starters, a cricket ball is heavier—by half an ounce—than the ball used in the American game. With a core of cork, sheathed in layers of twine and cork shavings, and wrapped in a bright red leather casing (it is sometimes called a "cherry"), a cricket ball is a fearsome projectile when launched at a batsman. Unlike in baseball, the bowler (the equivalent of the pitcher) is in full flight after sprinting for up to 30 paces before launching the ball. Nor is it usually bowled through the air; that is a "full toss" and considered easy to hit. Far more often, the ball is bounced off the ground, whose grass has usually been trimmed and rolled to a concrete-like hardness, and it may rise toward the batsman's head as a "bouncer" or "bumper." Balls have been clocked at 95 miles per hour or more (as fast as a major-league fastball); before the introduction of safety helmets, in the 1970s, it was not uncommon for batsmen to be felled, or seriously injured, by bouncers.
 * Simon Worrall, “The History of Cricket in the United States”, Smithsonian Magazine, (October 2006).

title: Cricket


text:
C. L. R. James

Cyril Lionel Robert James (4 January 1901 – 19 May 1989) was a Trinidadian-born anti-colonial Marxist activist and writer.

State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950)

 * State Capitalism and World Revolution (1950), ''.

 * All previous distinctions, politics and economics, war and peace, agitation and propaganda, party and mass, the individual and society, national, civil and imperialist war, single country and one world, immediate needs and ultimate solutions – all these it is impossible to keep separate any longer. Total planning is inseparable from permanent crisis, the world struggle for the minds of men from the world tendency to the complete mechanization of men. State-capitalism is in itself the total contradiction, absolute antagonism. In it are concentrated all the contradictions of revolution and counter-revolution. The proletariat, never so revolutionary as it is today, is over half the world in the stranglehold of Stalinism, the form of the counter-revolution in our day, the absolute opposite of the proletarian revolution. It is the totality of these contradictions that today compels philosophy, a total conception. Hence the propaganda ministry of Hitler, the omnipresent orthodoxy of Stalinism, the Voice of America. The war over productivity is fought in terms of philosophy, a way of life. When men question not the fruits of toil but the toil itself, then philosophy in Marx’s sense of human activity has become actual.

 * The crisis of production today is the crisis of the antagonism between manual and intellectual labor. The problem of modern philosophy from Descartes in the sixteenth century to Stalinism in 1950 is the problem of the division of labor between the intellectuals and the workers.

 * Rationalism is the philosophy of bourgeois political economy. It is materialist and not idealist in so far as it combats superstition, seeks to expand the productive forces and increase the sum total of goods. But there is no such thing as a classless materialism. Rationalism conceives this expansion as a division of labor between the passive masses and the active elite. Thereby it reinstates idealism. Because it does not and cannot doubt that harmonious progress is inevitable by this path, the essence of rationalism is uncritical or vulgar materialism, and uncritical or vulgar idealism. In the springtime of capitalism this rationalistic division of labor was the basis of a common attempt of individual men associated in a natural environment to achieve control over nature. Today this division of labor is the control in social production of the administrative elite over the masses. Rationalism has reached its end in the complete divorce and absolute disharmony between manual and intellectual labor, between the socialized proletariat and the monster of centralized capital. The specific political ideology developed by rationalism was democracy – equality of opportunity for all men to rise to the top, and hence equality in all spheres outside of production, before the law, at the polls and in the market.

 * Today, from end to end of the world, men know that democracy is bankrupt. What is to take its place they do not know. The alternative seems to be planned economy and one-party state. This is the philosophical question. But the philosophy of planned economy and is distinguishable from that of the bourgeoisie only by its more complete rationalism. The labor bureaucracy in power or out of it sees the solution to the crisis of production in scientific progress, greater output. It consciously seeks to plan and organize the division of labor as the means to further accumulation of capital. In ideology it is ready to expropriate those representatives of private property who stand in the way of this complete rationalization. But didn’t this bureaucracy develop out of the working class? It did and it could only have developed out of the working class. It is a product of the modern mass movement, created by the centralization of capital, and holds its position only because of this movement. At the same time it cannot conceive the necessity for abolishing the division of labor in production, the only solution to the crisis in production. By a remorseless logic, therefore, representation of the proletariat turns into its opposite, administration over the proletariat. The end of bourgeois rationalism is this crisis of the revolution and  in production.

 * So that in the end, the greatest of all the bourgeois philosophers, the most encyclopedic mind that Europe had produced, the founder of the dialectic, in Engels’ words, the maker of an epoch, could not transcend his historic barrier and was recaptured in the rationalist trap from which he had sought so profoundly to extricate European thought. Hegel destroyed all dogmatisms but one – the dogmatism of the backwardness of the masses. Once the revolutionary solution of the contradiction escaped him, he clung to the bureaucracy. The intellectual elite would rescue society and discipline the revolting masses. Reinstated were uncritical materialism, a purely material existence for the masses, and uncritical idealism, the solution of social crisis by the intellectual bureaucracy. We today who have seen Stalinism and the labor bureaucracy the world over can first fully comprehend this, Marx’s essential critique of Hegel. Only the revolutionary proletariat, said Marx, can appropriate the dialectical logic of Hegel. Hegel himself, because he held fast to the intellectual elite, ended up, despite his thoroughgoing analysis of contradiction and negativity, in the crass materialism and crass idealism of the state bureaucracy.

 * The philosophy of Stalinism is the philosophy of the elite, the bureaucracy, the organizers, the leaders, clothed in Marxist terminology. It is the extreme, the historical limit of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie, carefully organized to look like a new revolutionary doctrine. Stalinism, the ideology of state-capitalism, is the reinstatement of uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. The materialism is in the accumulation theory: the kernel of all Stalinist-Titoist philosophy is that the worker must work harder than he ever did before. The idealism is in the theory of the party: the leaders, the elite, must lead as they never did before. No one is more conscious of this than the Stalinist bureaucracy itself. At the center of all ideological campaigns in Stalinist Russia is the attitude of the workers toward their work.

 * For the Stalinist bureaucracy, state-property converts labor "from the drab burden it was under capitalism into a matter of honor and glory, a matter of prowess and heroism.” The intelligentsia tells the workers: You work. The workers, on the other hand, continue to resist speed up and the discipline of accumulated capital, statified or otherwise. This is called by the Stalinists "the old outlook on labor,” a "capitalist survival in the popular consciousness.” This is no longer a question of Soviet youth and textbooks in political economy. It is now the workers counterposing to the bureaucracy another "ideology” which the Stalinists admit "may spread to alarming dimensions."

 * On the surface it appeared that the Stalinist intervention was to defend the materialism of Marx against the idealism of Hegel. In reality the theoretical threat came from the revolutionary dialectical logic. In political economy the Stalinists seek to defend the classless nature of state-property and planning. The theoretical enemy is the theory of state-capitalism. In philosophy they seek to propagate the fiction of the classless nature of rationalism and materialism. The enemy is the proletariat resisting labor discipline by the bureaucracy. Again and again Zhdanov attacked Alexandrov for "objectivism.” The Stalinists are terrified by the obviously growing conviction that there is in Stalinist Russia an "objective” basis for the "struggle of opposites, the struggle between the old and the new, between the dying and the rising, between the decaying and the developing.” Such an objective basis could only be the class struggle. Hence they must purge Marxism of the Hegelian concept of the objectivity of contradiction.

 * The steps of Hegel’s decline are here undeviatingly retraced. Hegel, who did not know the socialized proletariat, began by regarding all history as the history of the philosopher, of consciousness and self-consciousness, and ended with the state bureaucracy. The Stalinists use almost the identical phrases. The proletariat’s role in the struggle for socialism is to work harder and harder, while the leadership and organization are left to the "criticism and self-criticism” of the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. Everything depends on the party, on the bureaucracy’s consciousness and self-consciousness of correctness and incorrectness, its direction, its control, its foresight. The masses are merely at the disposal of the party as they are at the disposal of capital. This is the Stalinist philosophy in every sphere, political economy, politics, history, education, literature, art.

 * To believe that this vigorous offensive in every sphere is a question of nationalism is a mistake as crippling as the belief that Stalinism betrays the revolution by social-patriotic support of the national state. In every country the Stalinists represent bureaucratic manipulation of the proletariat by the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. They are the extreme limit of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie, uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. Never before has so gigantic a state mobilized itself with such murderous vigilance to keep the proletariat at work while the leaders and organizers plan. This is the most deadly enemy the proletariat has ever had. Rationalism and counter-revolution have become one.

 * Since the end of World War II, and particularly with the philosophic systematization of the new idealism in 1947, the ideological mobilization of the bureaucracy has been total. The Stalinist bureaucracy unambiguously proclaims the one-party State of the Plan as the vital foundation of the Soviet system. To believe that this vigorous offensive in every sphere is a question of nationalism is a mistake as crippling as the belief that Stalinism betrays the revolution by social-patriotic support of the national state. In every country the Stalinists represent bureaucratic manipulation of the proletariat by the elite, the bureaucracy, the party. They are the extreme limit of the rationalism of the bourgeoisie, uncritical materialism and uncritical idealism. Never before has so gigantic a state mobilized itself with such murderous vigilance to keep the proletariat at work while the leaders and organizers plan. This is the most deadly enemy the proletariat has ever had. Rationalism and counter-revolution have become one.

 * The totality of the crisis has given manifold forms to the counter-revolution. The most deadly, the most insidious, the most dangerous is the Stalinist counter-revolution because it springs from the proletariat and cloaks itself in Marxist terminology.

 * The rationalism of the bourgeoisie has ended in the Stalinist one-party bureaucratic-administrative state of the Plan. In their repulsion from this rationalism and from the proletarian revolution, the middle classes fall back upon the barbarism of Fascism. The anti-Stalinist, anti-capitalist petty-bourgeois intellectuals, themselves the victims of the absolute division between mental and physical labor, do not know where to go or what to do. Unable to base themselves completely upon the modern proletariat, they turn inward, pursuing a self-destructive, soul-searching analysis of their own isolation, alienation and indecision. They too appropriate the Hegelian dialectic, interpreting it as an unceasing conflict in the individual between affirmation and negation, between deciding for and deciding against.

 * There is no longer any purely philosophical answer to all this. These philosophical questions, and very profound they are, Marxism says can be solved only by the revolutionary action of the proletariat and the masses. There is and can be no other answer. As we have said, we do not propose to do right what the Stalinists have failed to do or do wrong.

 * In France, philosophers, historians, scientists, and writers are active protagonists in heated debates over humanism (is it the total rationalism of Stalinism, or Christian Humanism, or Existentialism?); which of the three is the heir to Hegel? Often intellectuals turn toward Marx and Lenin and Hegel. They meet Stalinism which spends incredible time, care, energy and vigilance in holding Marx and Lenin within the bounds of their private-property state-property philosophy. The Stalinists repeat interminably that dialectics is the transformation of quantity into quality, leaps, breaks in continuity, opposition of capitalism and socialism. It is part and parcel of their determination to represent state-property as revolutionary. In 1917, when the struggle in the working class movement was between reform and revolution, these conceptions may have been debatable. Today all arguments fade into insignificance in face of the actuality. The critical question today, which the Stalinists must avoid like the revolution, is how was the October Revolution transformed into its opposite, the Stalinist counter-revolution, and how is this counter-revolution in turn to be transformed into its opposite. This is the dialectical law which Lenin mastered between 1914 and 1917, the negation of the negation, the self-mobilization of the proletariat as the economics and politics of socialism. The Stalinist bureaucracy is determined that not a hint of the revolutionary doctrines of Hegel, Marx, Lenin should ever go out without its imprint, its interpretation. The social cooperativeness and unity of modern labor does not allow it any laxity from its cruel and merciless state-capitalist need to make the workers work harder and harder. No hint of the revolutionary struggle against bureaucracy must come to workers or to questing intellectuals. Yet every strand of Marx’s and Lenin’s methodology, philosophy, political economy, lead today directly to the destruction of bureaucracy as such.

 * Some petty-bourgeois professors and students, theoretically, in history, philosophy and literature, are struggling through to a Marxist solution. The proletariat constantly tries to create itself as the state, i.e., no state at all. But Stalinism is the deadly enemy of both. It is the armed conscious active counter-revolution.

 * The proletariat, like every organism, must from itself and its conditions develop its own antagonisms and its own means of overcoming them. Stalinism is the decay of world capitalism, a state-capitalism within the proletariat itself and is in essence no more than an expression within the proletariat of the violent and insoluble tensions of capitalism at the stage of state-capitalism. One of the most urgent tasks is to trace the evolution of the counter-revolution within the revolution, from liberalism through anarchism, Social-Democracy, Noske, counter-revolutionary Menshevism, to Stalinism, its economic and social roots at each stage, its political manifestations, its contradictions and antagonisms. Unless Stalinism is attacked as the most potent mode of the counter-revolution, the counterrevolution of our epoch, it cannot be seriously attacked. But once this conception is grasped in all its implications, philosophical and methodological, then Stalinism and its methods, its principles, its aims, can be dealt a series of expanding blows against which it has no defense except slander and assassination. Our document gives only a faint outline of the tremendous scope of the revolutionary attack on Stalinism which the theory of state-capitalism opens up. It is the very nature of our age which brings philosophy from Lenin’s study in 1914 to the very forefront of the struggle for the remaking of the world.

 * In 1950 the universal is as far beyond 1917 as 1917 was beyond the Paris Commune. A serious analysis of Stalinism will show that it is precisely the advanced objective relations of society which compel the counterrevolution to assume this form and dress itself in Marxism, fake action committees and all. We have to draw a new universal, more concrete and embracing more creative freedom of the masses than even State and Revolution.

The Black Jacobins (1938)

 * Page numbers refer to Second Edition from Vintage Books (1963)

 * Christopher Columbus landed first in the New World at the island of San Salvador, and after praising God enquired urgently for gold.
 * p. 3.

 * There are and always will be some who, ashamed of the behavior of their ancestors, try to prove that slavery wasn't so bad after all, that its evils and its cruelty were the exaggerations of propagandists and not the habitual lot of the slaves. Men will say (and accept) anything in order to foster national pride or soothe a troubled conscience.
 * p. 13.

 * The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.
 * p. 77.

 * From their French masters, [the slaves] had known rape, torture, degradation, and, at the slightest provocation, death. They returned in kind. For two centuries the higher civilization had shown them that power was used for wreaking your will on those whom you controlled. Now that they held power they did as they had been taught.
 * p. 88.

 * 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.
 * pp. 88-89.

 * Compared with what their masters had done to them in cold blood, what [the slaves] did was negligible, and they were spurred on by the ferocity with which the whites in Le Cap treated all slave prisoners who fell into their hands.
 * p. 89

 * 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.
 * p. 283.

 * If you are not their slaves, you are rebels.
 * James is quoting Toussaint Louverture's speech to his troops--most of whom, like Toussaint himself, were former slaves. The "their" refers to the French imperialists, p. 307

 * Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.
 * p. 334

Beyond a Boundary (1963)

 * Page numbers from Duke University Press reprint, 2013

 * It seemed like a classic ploy by the conquerors: games, particularly so restrained and ritualistic a game as cricket, could be imposed upon the colonies to tame them, to herd them into the psychic boundaries where they would learn the values and ethics of the colonist. But once given the opportunity to play the master's game, to excel at it, the colonials gained a self-esteem that would eventually free them.
 * Introduction by Robert Lipsyte (p. XIX)

 * That James could not accept automatically that these athletes were the greedy spawn of an exploitative system is the positive proof of his own liberation and oppression through sports. He was ennobled and crippled by cricket; he reached beyond his boundary but would always have a blind spot.
 * Introduction by Robert Lipsyte (p. XX)

 * Respectability was not an ideal, it was an armour.
 * p. 8

 * Before very long I acquired a discipline for which the only name is Puritan. I never cheated, I never appealed for a decision unless I thought the batsman was out.
 * p. 26

 * 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.
 * p. 51

 * 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.
 * p. 52

 * 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'.
 * p. 53

 * Here, on the cricket field if nowhere else, all men in the island are equal, and we are the best men in the island.
 * p. 55

 * I do not want to get liberated from them [memories of racialism]. I would consider liberation from them a grievous loss, irreparable.
 * p. 59

 * 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.
 * p. 153

 * 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.
 * p. 153-154

 * The first recorded date in European history is 776 B.C., the date of the first Olympic Games.
 * p. 154

 * 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.
 * p. 156

 * Dickens saw Victorian England always with the eyres of a pre-Victorian. His ideal England was the England of Hazlitt and of Pickwick.
 * p. 161

 * 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.
 * p. 196

 * 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.
 * p. 229

 * 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.
 * p. 241

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

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

Quotes about C. L. R. James

 * As Cedric Robinson argued, a group of radical black intellectuals including W. E. B. Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Ralph Bunche, Oliver Cox, and others, understood fascism not as some aberration from the march of progress, an unexpected right-wing turn, but a logical development of Western civilization itself.
 * Robin Kelley Freedom Dreams (2002)

title: C. L. R. James


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User talk:Guanaco

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