40 Quotes by Stuart Hall

The very notion of Great Britain's 'greatness' is bound up with empire. Euro-scepticism and Little Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood and rotted English teeth.

I tend to think some things are off-limits. Not in the sense that you should not be able to say them, but you need some care about how and when you go into them. If you wanted to make a joke about concentration camps you should think twice. At least twice.

If I have to read another cultural studies analysis of 'The Sopranos,' I give up. There's an awful lot of rubbish around masquerading as cultural studies.

I got involved in cultural studies because I didn't think life was purely economically determined. I took all this up as an argument with economic determinism. I lived my life as an argument with Marxism, and with neoliberalism. Their point is that, in the last instance, economy will determine it. But when is the last instance?

People have to have a language to speak about where they are and what other possible futures are available to them.

I would say that New Labour come closer to institutionalising neoliberalism as a social and political form than Thatcher did.

What I realized the moment I got to Oxford was that someone like me could not really be part of it. I mean, I could make a success there, I could even be perhaps accepted into it, but I would never feel it was my place. It's the summit of something else. It's distilled Englishness.

I sometimes fee like the spirit of the past resurrected... After all, didn't cultural studies emerge somewhere at that moment when I first met Raymond Williams or in the glance I exchanged with Richard Hoggart? In that moment, cultural studies was born. It emerged full grown from my head!

A lot of crap goes on in media studies, like in almost everything.