However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

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.

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.

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

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

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.