17 quotes
Here, on the cricket field if nowhere else, all men in the island are equal, and we are the best men in the island.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
The first recorded date in European history is 776 B.C., the date of the first Olympic Games.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Before very long I acquired a discipline for which the only name is Puritan. I never cheated, I never appealed for a decision unless I thought the batsman was out.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Respectability was not an ideal, it was an armour.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
I do not want to get liberated from them [memories of racialism]. I would consider liberation from them a grievous loss, irreparable.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
It is an historical commonplace that social explosions take place when most of the fundamental causes of dissatisfaction have been removed and only a few remain. This is the result of a feeling of power.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Body-line was not an incident, it was not an accident, it was not a temporary aberration. It was the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket.
Beyond a Boundary (1966)
There can be raw pain and bleeding where so many thousands see the inevitable ups and downs of only a game.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
So it was that I became one of those dark men whose 'surest sign of ... having arrived is the fact that he keeps company with people lighter in complexion than himself'.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belongs with theatre, ballet, opera and the dance.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Cricket had plunged me into politics long before I was aware of it. When I did turn to politics I did not have too much to learn.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Cricket is an art, not a bastard or a poor relation, but a full member of the community. (...) Cricket is first and foremost a dramatic spectacle. It belong with the theatre, ballet, opera and dance.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Dickens saw Victorian England always with the eyres of a pre-Victorian. His ideal England was the England of Hazlitt and of Pickwick.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
Youth though he was, he put the length ball through the covers off his back foot in a manner that made me wonder at the injustice which allows one person to do without effort what others sweat in vain to achieve.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
The people most affected by this are people of the middle class who, lacking the hard contact with realities of the masses and unable to attain to the freedoms of a leisured class, are more than all types of people given to trivial divisions and subdivisions of social rank and precedence.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
I could, of course, wait for the Conservative Party or the Labour Party to organise a sample poll. A poll on art. A sample poll! A sample poll can investigate only what the pollsters know, and it cannot do even that properly.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)
That James could not accept automatically that these athletes were the greedy spawn of an exploitative system is the positive proof of his own liberation and oppression through sports. He was ennobled and crippled by cricket; he reached beyond his boundary but would always have a blind spot.
Beyond a Boundary (1963)