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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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