Quotes from Stuart Hall

The right of the labour movement, to be honest, has no ideas of any compelling quality, except the instinct for short-term political survival. It would not know an ideological struggle if it stumbled across one in the dark. The only 'struggle' it engages in with any trace of conviction is the one against the left.

Race is the modality in which class is lived.

Music has been called 'the most noise conveying the least information

Consensual' views of society represent society as if there are no major cultural or economic breaks, no major conflicts of interests between classes and groups. Whatever disagreements exist, it is said, there are legitimate and institutionalised means for expressing and reconciling them.

The audience as community has come to depend on the performer's skills, and on the force of a personal style, to articulate its common values and interpret its experiences.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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?

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

Identity is becoming more dependent on what people are willing subscribe to and less dependent on objective criteria such as skin colour or where they're born. Ways of identifying blackness are no longer black or white. It's not a case of us or them, you can now be us and them; like them but different.

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.