Frantz Fanon Quotes

When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.

Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.

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

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

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.

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

What matters is not to know the world but to change it.

To educate the masses politically is to make the totality of the nation a reality to each citizen. It is to make the history of the nation part of the personal experience of each of its citizens.

He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me.

The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.

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

...There are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.

For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.

Everything can be explained to the people, on the single condition that you want them to understand.

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.

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

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

The Church in the colonies is the white people's Church, the foreigner's Church. She does not call the native to God's ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.

Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.

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

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

O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

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

The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people.

I came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at origin of the world, and here I am an object among other objects.

Culture has never the translucidity of custom; it abhors all simplification. In its essence it is opposed to custom, for custom is always the deterioration of culture.

In the colonial context the settler only ends his work of breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man's values.

When people like me, they like me "in spite of my color." When they dislike me; they point out that it isn't because of my color. Either way, I am locked in to the infernal circle.

Violence is man re-creating himself.

For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

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

Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent.

It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

The colonized is elevated above his jungle status in proportion to his adoption of the mother country's cultural standards.

Certain things need to be said if one is to avoid falsifying the problem.

When I search for Man in the technique and the style of Europe, I see only a succession of negations of man, and an avalanche of murders.

Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.

Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.

For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.

The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere.

There is a point at which methods devour themselves.

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.

No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free.

Every race will have disagreements amongst themselves, but we must put aside our differences, and work together for the advancement of that race" Sandra Forsythe

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

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

For Europe, for ourselves and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man.

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