40 Quotes by Stuart Hall

There's no permanent, fixed class consciousness. You can't work out immediately what people think and what politics they have simply by looking at their socio-economic position.

Britain is not homogenous; it was never a society without conflict. The English fought tooth and nail over everything we know of as English political virtues - rule of law, free speech, the franchise.

You must have the modesty of saying, this is a bloody good idea but I probably won't believe it in five years' time.

Thatcherism, as an ideology, addresses the fears, the anxieties, the lost identities, of a people. It invites us to think about politics in images. It is addressed to our collective fantasies, to Britain as an imagined community, to the social imaginary.

I thought I might find the real me in Oxford. Civil rights made me accept being a black intellectual. There was no such thing before, but then it was something. So I became one.

My family belonged to a very particular formation - middle-class and coloured, not black. That meant it had a closer connection to the plantocracy than many other people did. So I didn't feel like an ordinary black Jamaican boy.

I've never been a disciple of any school. I've lived too long. I've seen all the schools, I've seen people say, I'm sorry, Althusser was wrong after all. You can only do that about three times in your life; after that, you begin to feel like a fool!

Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home. I'm not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.

I'm the blackest member of my family. You know, these mixed families produce children of all colors, and in Jamaica, the question of exactly what shade you were, in colonial Jamaica, that was the most important question. Because you could read off class and education and status from that. I was aware and conscious of that from the very beginning.