Frantz Fanon - The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

19 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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
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
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