Trinidadian sayings carry calypso’s sly grin and steelpan’s ringing clarity, blending humor with a sharp social eye. They move between picong and prayer, liming wisdom and market bravado, threading island English, patois, and Hindi echoes. Expect quick turns, double-entendres, and a stubborn tenderness for home: rain and scorch, cane and concrete, blue devils, jab jab, Moruga pepper heat. The quotes tilt toward resilience, satire, and everyday ceremony, where a gentle “ent?” can settle debate and a well-aimed “steups” speaks volumes.
"Du Bois marked a great stage in the history of Negro struggles when he said that Negroes could no longer accept the subordination which Booker T. Washington had preached"
"I was a Labour Party man but I found myself to the left of the Labour party in Nelson, militant as that was. I came to London and in a few months I was a Trotskyist"
"I had formed a black movement, so I would speak for the Trotskyist movement and then walk about a hundred yards to where the black movement was speaking"
"The most striking development of the great depression of 1929 is a profound skepticism of the future of contemporary society among large sections of the American people"
"In the last quarter of the eighteenth century bourgeois Europe needed to emancipate itself from that combination of feudalism and commercial capitalism which we know as mercantilism"
"The international proletariat first appeared on the scene in the early Thirties of the nineteenth century, and its first great action was the French Revolution of 1848"
"One of the surest signs of the estimated changes in the consciousness of the American proletariat is to be found in the character of the demands now being put forward by the leadership"
"Today we ought to be able to see first that Booker T. Washington faced a situation in which he was seeking desperately for a way out, and he could see no way out except capitulation"
"In World War II the hostility and the exasperation resulting from the statification of the economy and the strain of the war have been directed as much against the government as against private capital"
"After World War I the resentment of the working class against all that it had to suffer was directed more against Morgan, Wall Street and private capital than the government"
"My father was a teacher, and there were teachers all around, his friends, they were working for the Government and their behaviour was within strictly limited areas"
