Frantz Fanon Quotes

59 Sourced Quotes

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.

Frantz Fanon
When the native hears a speech about Western culture he pulls out his knife—or at least he makes sure it is within reach. The violence with which the supremacy of white values is affirmed and the aggressiveness which has permeated the victory of these values over the ways of life and of thought of the native mean that, in revenge, the native laughs in mockery when Western values are mentioned in front of him.

Frantz Fanon
The settler makes history and is conscious of making it. And because he constantly refers to the history of his mother country, he clearly indicates that he himself is the extension of that mother country. Thus the history which he writes is not the history of the country which he plunders but the history of his own nation in regard to all that she skims off, all that she violates and starves.

Frantz Fanon
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos.

Frantz Fanon
The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anti-colonialism, indeed capitalism versus socialism, is already losing its importance. What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.

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

Frantz Fanon
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.

Frantz Fanon
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.

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

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

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

Frantz Fanon
I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple.

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

Frantz Fanon
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.

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

Frantz Fanon
From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.

Frantz Fanon
Leave this Europe where they are never done talking of Man yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their own streets, in all the corners of the globe.

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

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

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

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

Frantz Fanon
I, the man of color, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be.

Frantz Fanon
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.

Frantz Fanon
I came into the world imbued with the will to find a meaning in things, my spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then I found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.

Frantz Fanon
Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state, and it will only yield when confronted with greater violence.

Frantz Fanon
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.

Frantz Fanon
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.

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

Frantz Fanon
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.

Frantz Fanon