69 Quotes by Trinidadian authors

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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.

See the complete list of authors from Trinidad and Tobago

"I had a national and international reputation. I had written the history and articles. So I brought to the Trotskyist movement some international reputation"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"It is not only that Germany has been defeated in the war, Kaiser Wilhelm's Germany was defeated"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"I must say the idea of a United Africa was nonsense"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"Capitalism has socialized production. It has brought thousands of people together in the factory and involved them in new social relationships"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"All the world has been converted and Washington is the modem Mecca"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"As the class struggle sharpens in the U.S. Marxism will come into its own as a great popular study"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"The country has undergone a profound social upheaval, the greatest the proletariat has ever known"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"The home stands in contrast to all other capitalist institutions as the last stronghold of pre-capitalist isolation"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"The antagonisms between men and women express themselves in the most delicate phase of their life together - in their sexual relationship"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"Technological discoveries are the spermatozoa of social change"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"First of all, Bolshevism represents revolution and the revolutionary struggle"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"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"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"It is in revolutionary periods that the culmination of previous trends and the beginning of new ones appear"

C. L. R. James, Journalist

"Once I grew from 6'1" to about 6'6", by that time I was going into 12th grade, and that's when I started wanting to play basketball, because, pretty much basketball players always got the girl"

Eric Williams, Historian

"My mental approach is totally different. My coach predicated everything on defense. He always talked about defense, defense, defense. I took it to heart that if you play defense, you can take the heart from an offensive player"

Eric Williams, Historian

"I played baseball, and that's pretty much it. Basketball came late, this was, basketball was the sport that I tried to master, I kind of mastered baseball, so basketball was one of those things where I wanted to master this game, so that's why I probably play it the way I do"

Eric Williams, Historian

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