Frantz Fanon Quotes

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

When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture.

We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.

A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.

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.

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.

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.

The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.

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

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.

A man who has a language consequently possesses the world expressed and implied by that language.

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.

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.

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

To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

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.

It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.

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.

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

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.

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.

Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.

The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved.

The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.

Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.

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

[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.

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

For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.