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

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

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.

We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.

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

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.

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.