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.

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.

When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.

This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.

Dissimulation is the refuge of the slave.

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.

The patience and forbearance of the poor are among the strongest bulwarks of the rich.