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Frantz Fanon

39 quotes

“We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Roger Tayeb, December 1961, as cited in Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971), p. 185.
“Every veil that fell, every body that became liberated from traditional embrace of the haik, every face that offered itself to the bold and impatient glance of the occupier, was a negative expression of the fact that Algeria was beginning to deny herself and was accepting the rape of the colonizer.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why write this book? No one has asked me for it. Especially those to whom it is directed. Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born. In most cases, the black man lacks the advantage of being able to accomplish this descent into real hell.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The black is a black man;that is, as the result of a series of aberrations of affect, he is rooted at the core of a universe from which he must be extricated.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By refusing to multiply our element, we take the risk of not setting a limit to our field ; for it is essential to convey to the black man that an attitude of rupture has never saved anyone.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is there to say? Purely and simply this: When a bachelor of philosophy from Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the ground of his color. I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. Wren one 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 (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A white man addressing a Negro behaves exactly like an adult with a child and starts smirking, whispering, patronizing, cozening. It is not one white man I have watched, but hundreds; and I have not limited my investigation to any one class but, if I may claim an essentially objective position, I have made a point of observing such behavior in physician, policemen, employers.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Man is motion toward the world and toward his like. A movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of love, a gift of self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called ethical orientation. Every consciousness seems to have the capacity to demonstrate these two components, simultaneously or alternatively. The person I love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my manhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value-making superstructure on my whole vision of the world.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In no way should my color be regarded as a flaw. From the comment the Negro accepts the separation imposed by the European he has no further respite, and "is it not understandable that thenceforward he will try to elevate himself to the white man's level? to elevate himself in the range of colors to which he attributes a kid of hierarchy. We shall see that another solution is possible. It implies a restructuring of the world.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is South Africa? A boiler into which thirteen million blacks are clubbed and penned in by two and a half million whites. If the poor whites hate the Negroes, it is not, as M. Mannoni would have us believe, because "racialism is the work of petty officials, small traders, and colonials who have toiled much without great success." No; it is because the structure of South Africa is a racist structure.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All forms of exploitation resemble one another. They all seek the source of their necessity in some edict of a Biblical nature. All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same "object": man.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Every one of my acts commits me as a man. Every one of my silences, every one of my cowardices reveals me as a man.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, European civilization and its best representatives are responsible for colonial racism.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I said just above that South Africa has a racist structure. Now I shall go farther and say that Europe has a racist structure.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The landing of the white man on Madagascar inflicted injury without measure. The consequences of that irruption of Europeans onto Madagascar were not psychological alone, since, as every authority has observed, there are inner relationships between consciousness and the social context.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Dirty nigger!" Or simply, "Look! A Negro!" 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 (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Negro is a toy in the white man's hands; so, in order to shatter the hellish cycle, he explodes.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In every society, in every collectivity, exists - a channel, an outlet through which the forces accumulated in the form of aggression.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the magazines the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; sinc there is always identification with the citor, the little negro, quite as easily as the little white boy, becomes an explorer, an adventurer, a missionary " who faces the danger of being eaten by the wicked Negroes.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To describe a revolution, one doesn't have to describe armed actions. These are inevitable, but what defines and decides any revolution is the social struggle of the masses, supported by armed actions. Fanon shows that this was the Algerian way. The guerrillas in the mountains, the army of liberation, did not defeat the French army militarily: it was the whole population supported by the guerrilla army which defeated and destroyed the imperialist enemy as a social force.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The colonized person, who in this respect is like the men in underdeveloped countries or the disinherited in all parts of the world, perceives life not as a flowering or a development of an essential productiveness, but as a permanent struggle against an omnipresent death. This ever-menacing death is experienced as endemic famine, unemployment, a high mortality rate, an inferiority complex and the absence of any hope for the future.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“With an Algerian woman, there is no progressive conquest, no mutual revelation. Straight off, with the maximum of violence, there is possession, rape, near-murder. The act assumes a para-neurotic brutality and sadism, even in a normal European. This brutality and this sadism are in fact emphasized by the frightened attitude of the Algerian woman. In the dream, the woman-victim screams, struggles like a doe, and as she weakens and faints, is penetrated, martyrized, ripped apart.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The decision to kill a civilian in the street is not an easy one, and no one comes to it lightly. No one takes the step of placing a bomb in a public place without a battle of conscience.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Algerian people need not restate their position with respect to these men who have considered Algeria and the Algerians as a private reserve. The people have excluded them from the Algerian nation and they must not hope to be "taken back.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As soon as they are born it is obvious to them that their cramped world, riddled with taboos, can only be challenged by out and out violence.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The serf is essentially different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is needed to justify this difference in status.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When the colonized hear a speech on Western culture they draw their machetes or at least check to see they are close to hand. The supremacy of white values is stated with such violence, the victorious confrontation of these values with the lifestyle and beliefs of the colonized is so impregnated with aggressiveness, that as a counter measure the colonized rightly make a mockery of them whenever they are mentioned.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist's sector, burying it deep within the earth or banishing it from the territory.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Church in the colonies is a white man's Church, a foreigners' Church. It does not call the colonized to the ways of God, but to the ways of the white man, to the ways of the master, the ways of the oppressor.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, 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 (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The living expression of the nation is the collective consciousness in motion of the entire people.”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The childhood of Mayotte Capécia shows us a certain number of characteristics that illustrate the line of orientation she followed as an adult. And each time there is a movement or a contact, it will have a direct relation to her goal. It would seem indeed that for her white and black represent the two poles of a world, two poles in perpetual conflict: a genuinely Manichean concept of the world; the word has been spoken, it must be remembered—white or black, that is the question. I am white: that is to say I possess beauty and virtue, which have never been black. I am the color of daylight.... 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, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be , can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. If I am black, it is not the result of a curse, but it is because, having offered my skin, I have been able to absorb all the cosmic effluvia. I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth...”
Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) said by 1961 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source