Frantz Fanon Quotes

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

Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.

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

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.

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.

The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery.

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.

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.