Quotes from Frantz Fanon

It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above.

Chaque fois qu'un homme a fait triompher la dignité de l'esprit, chaque fois qu'un homme a dit non à une tentative d'asservissement de son semblable, je me suis senti solidaire de son acte.

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

there is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language.

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.

An endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of incompleteness.

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

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

What matters is not so much the color of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

As a man, I undertake to risk annihilation so that two or three truths can cast their essential light on the world.

And the day when our human race has fully matured, it will not define itself as the sum of the inhabitants of the globe, but as the infinite unity of their reciprocities.

For me words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question-mark.

I should constantly remind myself that the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the world in which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental hypothesis that I will initiate my cycle of freedom.

I do battle for the creation of a human world - that ism a world of reciprocal recognition.

Color is nothing, I do not even notice it, I know only one thing, which is the purity of my conscience and the whiteness of my soul.

It is the racist who creates the inferiorized.

The misfortune of man is that he was once a child.

In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich."33

That famous dictatorship, whose supporters believe that it is called for by the historical process and consider it an indispensable prelude to the dawn of independence, in fact symbolizes the decision of the bourgeois caste to govern the underdeveloped country first with the help of the people, but soon against them.

What makes a bourgeoisie is not its attitude, taste, or manners. It is not even its aspirations. The bourgeoisie is above all the direct product of precise economic realities.

The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.

As soon as the Negro comes to an understanding of himself, and understands the rest of the world differently, when he gives birth to hope and forces back the racist universe, it is clear that his trumpet sounds more clearly and his voice less hoarsely. The new fashions in jazz are not simply born of economic competition. We must without any doubt see in them one of the consequences of the defeat, slow but sure, of the southern world of the United States.

The colonized intellectual is responsible not to his national culture, but to the nation as a whole, whose culture is, after all, but one aspect. The colonized intellectual should not be concerned with choosing how or where he decides to wage the national struggle. (168)

National culture is the collective thought process of a people to describe, justify, and extol the actions whereby they have joined forces and remained strong. National culture in the underdeveloped countries, therefore, must lie at the very heart of the liberation struggle these countries are waging. (168)