73+ Frantz Fanon Quotes On Decolonization, Violence And Education

Frantz Fanon was a French psychoanalyst, philosopher, and revolutionary. He was born in Martinique in 1925 and is best known for his work on decolonization and the psychological effects of colonialism. He wrote several influential books, including Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth, which have had a major impact on post-colonial studies, critical theory, and philosophy. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Frantz Fanon on decolonization, violence, education.

Top 10 Frantz Fanon Quotes

1. Wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery.
2. Violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect
3. When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.
4. A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.
5. Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.
6. The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.
7. In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.
8. A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.
9. The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.
10. To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Frantz Fanon Image Quotes

In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. — Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon Short Quotes

• The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.
• The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people.
• For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.
• It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.
• Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.
• Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.
• Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.
• For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.
• O my body, make of me always a man who questions!
• No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free.

Frantz Fanon Quotes About Education

The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps. — Frantz Fanon

[Educated blacks] Society refuses to consider them genuine Negroes. The Negro is a savage, whereas the student is civilized. "You're us," and if anyone thinks you are a Negro he is mistaken, because you merely look like one. — Frantz Fanon

To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens. — Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon Quotes About Language

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. — Frantz Fanon

The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder. — Frantz Fanon

Mastery of language affords remarkable power. — Frantz Fanon

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. — Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon Quotes About World

I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. — Frantz Fanon

I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness — Frantz Fanon

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects. — Frantz Fanon

I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple. — Frantz Fanon

What matters is not to know the world but to change it. — Frantz Fanon

...There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it. — Frantz Fanon

I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects. — Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon Famous Quotes And Sayings

The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be. — Frantz Fanon

National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon. — Frantz Fanon

In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. — Frantz Fanon

The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist's sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession; of sitting at the colonist's table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is an envious man. — Frantz Fanon

Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions — Frantz Fanon

Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture. — Frantz Fanon

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values. — Frantz Fanon

When people like me, they like me "in spite of my color." When they dislike me; they point out that it isn't because of my color. Either way, I am locked in to the infernal circle. — Frantz Fanon

The life of the nation is shot through with a certain falseness and hypocrisy, which are all the more tragic because they are so often subconscious rather than deliberate ... The soul of the people is putrescent, and until that becomes regenerate and clean, no good work can be done. — Frantz Fanon

The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. — Frantz Fanon

Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub. — Frantz Fanon

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders. — Frantz Fanon

The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere. — Frantz Fanon

Every race will have disagreements amongst themselves, but we must put aside our differences, and work together for the advancement of that race" Sandra Forsythe — Frantz Fanon

We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition. — Frantz Fanon

And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization a simply a question of relative strength. — Frantz Fanon

Anti-Semitism hits me on the head: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being man. I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother. — Frantz Fanon

For the beloved should not allow me to turn my infantile fantasies into reality: On the contrary, he should help me to go beyond them. — Frantz Fanon

The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves. — Frantz Fanon

Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand. — Frantz Fanon

If the building of a bridge does not enrich the awareness of those who work on it, then the bridge ought not to be built. — Frantz Fanon

For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. — Frantz Fanon

Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. — Frantz Fanon

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief. — Frantz Fanon

For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity. — Frantz Fanon

Certain things need to be said if one is to avoid falsifying the problem. — Frantz Fanon

The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation. — Frantz Fanon

When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men. — Frantz Fanon

Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions. — Frantz Fanon

Collective guilt is borne by what is conventionally called the scapegoat. Now the scapegoat for white society - which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement - will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro. — Frantz Fanon

What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary. — Frantz Fanon

Every colonized people-in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality-finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country. The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards. — Frantz Fanon

Colinialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natrual resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply. — Frantz Fanon

Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone. — Frantz Fanon

I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be. — Frantz Fanon

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it. — Frantz Fanon

My intimate knowledge of many central African tribes has everywhere convinced me of the necessity that the Negro does not respect treaties but only brute force.”• General Adrian Dietrich Lothar von Trotha on German South West Africa “At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction, it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect. — Frantz Fanon

There is a point at which methods devour themselves. — Frantz Fanon

They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement. — Frantz Fanon

I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth. — Frantz Fanon

Life Lessons by Frantz Fanon

Frantz Fanon taught us to recognize the power of our own minds and to use it to create a better world. He encouraged us to challenge oppressive systems and to strive for justice and equality. He also taught us to be mindful of our own internalized biases so that we can work to create a world where everyone is respected and valued.