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

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

There is a point at which methods devour themselves.

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

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.

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

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