Quotes from Frantz Fanon

Neither stubborn courage nor fine slogans are enough.

De la partie la plus noire de mon âme, à travers la zone hachurée me monte ce désir d'être tout à coup blanc. Je ne veux pas être reconnu comme Noir, mais comme Blanc. Or [...] qui peut la faire, sinon la Blanche? En m'aimant, elle me prouve que je suis digne d'un amour blanc.

The native is always on the alert, for since he can only make out with difficulty the many symbols of the colonial world, he is never sure whether or not he has crossed the frontier. Confronted with a world ruled by the settler, the native is always presumed guilty.

The settler-native relationship is a mass relationship. The settler pits brute force against the weight of numbers. He is an exhibitionist. His preoccupation with security makes him remind the native that there he alone is the master.

The colonized intellectual has invested his aggression in his barely veiled wish to be assimilated to the colonizer's world. He has placed his aggression at the service of his own interests, his interests as an individual.

America has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of Europe have reached frightening proportions.

The masses, however, have no intention of looking on as the chances of individual success improve.

Deep down in the European unconscious has been hollowed out an excessively black pit where the most immoral instincts and unmentionable desires slumber. And since every man aspires to whiteness and light, the European has attempted to repudiate this primitive personality, which does its best to defens itself. When European civilisation came into contact with the black world, with these savages, everyone was in agreement that these block people were the essence of evil.

Resorting to technical language means you are determined to treat the masses as uninitiated. Such language is a poor front for the lecturer's intent to deceive the people and leave them on the sidelines. Language's endeavor to confuse is a mask behind which looms an even greater undertaking to dispossess. The intention is to strip the people of their possessions as well as their sovereignty. You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand.

Nor will we acquiesce in the help for underdeveloped countries being a program of "sisters of charity." This help should be the ratification of a double realization: the realization by the colonized peoples that it is their due , and the realization by the capitalist powers that in fact they must pay .

Our victims know us by their wounds and shackles: that is what makes their testimony irrefutable. They only need to know what we have done to them for us to realize what we have done to ourselves. Is this necessary? Yes, because Europe is doomed.

21?At the last school prize-giving ceremony in Dakar, the president of the Republic of Senegal, Léopold Senghor, announced that negritude should be included in the school curriculum. If this decision is an exercise in cultural history, it can only be approved. But if it is a matter of shaping black consciousness it is simply turning one's back on history which has already noted the fact that most "Negroes" have ceased to exist.

you pretend to forget that you have colonies where massacres are committed in your name. Fanon reveals to his comrades — especially to those who remain a little too Westernized — the solidarity of the metropolitans with their colonial agents. Have the courage to read it, primarily because it will make you feel ashamed

nationalism is not explained, enriched, and deepened, if it does not very quickly turn into a social and political consciousness, into humanism, then it leads to a dead-end."23

When the militants asked that the wind of history be given a little more in-depth analysis, the leaders retorted with the notion of hope, and the necessity and inevitability of decolonization, etc.

The nationalist leaders know that international opinion is forged solely by the Western press. When a Western journalist interviews us, however, it is seldom done to render us service.

Qu'est-ce donc en réalité que cette violence ? Nous l'avons vu, c'est l'intuition qu'ont les masses colonisées que leur libération doit se faire, et ne peut se faire que par la force.

Whether he likes it or not, the black man has to wear the livery the white man has fabricated for him

To politicize the masses is to make the nation in its totality a reality for every citizen. To make the experience of the nation, the experience of every citizen" (140).

The young bourgeoisie, which seems stricken by premature senility, ignores the advice proffered and proves incapable of understanding that it is in its own interest to veil, even slightly, its exploitation of the people.

To politicize the masses is to make the nation in its totality a reality for every citizen. To make the experience of the nation, the experience of every citizen. (140)

For the people the party is not the authority but the organization whereby they, the people, exert their authority and will. The less confusion there is, the less duality of powers, the more the party can fulfill its role as guide and the more it will become a decisive guarantee for the people. (128)

You can explain anything to the people provided you really want them to understand

The argument chosen by the colonized was conveyed to them by the colonist, and by an ironic twist of fate it is now the colonized who state that it is the colonizer who only understands the language of force.