Frantz Fanon Quotes

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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.

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

Frantz Fanon
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.

Frantz Fanon
The shape of Africa resembles a revolver, and the Congo is the trigger.

Frantz Fanon
Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.

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

Frantz Fanon
I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos — and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of understanding Louis Armstrong or songs from the Congo. I am black, not because of a curse, but because my skin has been able to capture all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a drop of sun under the earth.

Frantz Fanon
Fervour is the weapon of choice of the impotent.

Frantz Fanon
Two centuries ago, a former European colony decided to catch up with Europe. It succeeded so well that the United States of America became a monster, in which the taints, the sickness and the inhumanity of Europe have grown to appalling dimensions

Frantz Fanon
Nationalism, that magnificent song that made the people rise against their oppressors, stops short, falters and dies away on the day that independence is proclaimed.

Frantz Fanon
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.

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

Frantz Fanon
The unpreparedness of the educated classes, the lack of practical links between them and the mass of the people, their laziness, and, let it be said, their cowardice at the decisive moment of the struggle will give rise to tragic mishaps.

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

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

Frantz Fanon
To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.

Frantz Fanon
National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

Frantz Fanon
When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.

Frantz Fanon
The black man has two dimensions. One with his fellows, the other with the white man. A Negro behaves differently with a white man and with another Negro. That this self-division is a direct result of colonialist subjugation is beyond question.

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

Frantz Fanon
Collective guilt is borne by what is conventionally called the scapegoat. Now the scapegoat for white society - which is based on myths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement - will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro.

Frantz Fanon
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

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

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

Frantz Fanon
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.

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

Frantz Fanon
The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist's sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession; of sitting at the colonist's table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is an envious man.

Frantz Fanon
All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same "object": man.

Frantz Fanon
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.

Frantz Fanon
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.

Frantz Fanon