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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.