Frantz Fanon Quotes

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 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me.

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.

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

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.

Taking the continent as a whole, this religious tension may be responsible for the revival of the commonest racial feeling. Africa is divided into Black and White, and the names that are substituted- Africa south of the Sahara, Africa north of the Sahara- do not manage to hide this latent racism. Here, it is affirmed that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture; that she is Mediterranean, that she is a continuation of Europe and that she shares in Graeco-Latin civilization. Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilized - in a word, savage.

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.

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

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.

When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.

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

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

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

Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street.

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.

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

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.

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

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

[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.

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.

Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies are the enemies of underdeveloped countries. On the other hand a regime which is completely oriented towards the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands of a few who regard the nation as a whole with scorn and contempt.

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

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