Black Fanon Quotes & Sayings

If directors, actors and writers have the ability to drop their alpha-male egos, you will always get better work. In terms of my own demands, I actually want fewer lines. If I can lose a line and do it with my face, I'd rather do that. — Max Beesley

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. — Frantz Fanon

I photograph only something that has to do with me, and I never did anything that I did not want to do. I do not do editorial and I never do advertising. No, my freedom is something I do not give away easily. — Josef Koudelka

I grew up in the midst of poverty but every black kid that I knew could read and write. We have to talk about the fact that we cannot educate for critical consciousness if we have a group of people who cannot access Fanon, Cabral, or Audre Lorde because they can't read or write. How did Malcolm X radicalize his consciousness? He did it through books. If you deprive working-class and poor black people of access to reading and writing, you are making them that much farther removed from being a class that can engage in revolutionary resistance. — Bell Hooks

Do the poet and scientist not work analogously? Both are willing to waste effort. To be hard on himself is one ... of the main strengths of each. Each is attentive to clues, each must narrow the choice, must strive for precision. As George Grosz says, "In art there is no place for gossip and but a small place for the satirist." The objective is fertile procedure. Is it not? Jacob Bronowski says in The Saturday Evening Post that science is not a mere collection of discoveries, but that science is the process of discovering. In any case it's not established once and for all; it's evolving. — Marianne Moore

Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub. — 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

Taking the continent as a whole, this religious tension may be responsible for the revival of the commonest racial feeling. Africa is divided into Black and White, and the names that are substituted- Africa south of the Sahara, Africa north of the Sahara- do not manage to hide this latent racism. Here, it is affirmed that White Africa has a thousand-year-old tradition of culture; that she is Mediterranean, that she is a continuation of Europe and that she shares in Graeco-Latin civilization. Black Africa is looked on as a region that is inert, brutal, uncivilized - in a word, savage. — Frantz Fanon

You can't sit on a lead and run a few plays into the line and just kill the clock. You've got to throw the ball over the damn plate and give the other man his chance. That's why baseball is the greatest game of them all. — Earl Weaver

When someone strives & 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

Ninety percent of all people under 30 are in developing countries, and that means that this new access to tech, which is such a positive thing ... is also a ticking time bomb of frustration ... You get this clear mismatch of opportunity and expectation. — Ronan Farrow

What a fool. In purgatory there is really nothing else to be. I — Peter Heller

I suppose it's comfort, perhaps a sense of self-control, doing worse things to yourself than the world will ever dare inflict. — Chuck Palahniuk

A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible. — Henry Adams

It is true that, with TV, a writer gets a great deal more respect. — Jon Spaihts

For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. — Frantz Fanon

None of this matters a bit. Yet, of course, it matters at that moment. So we try to be mindful of the moment; but it's fleeting. — Frederick Lenz

May I ask you if you've noticed,
May I ask you if you've seen.
My minnow Minnie
Who was swimmin'
In you Ovaltine?
For you've gone and drunk it up, dear,
And she isn't in the cup, dear.
And she's nowhere to be found, dear.
Do you think that she has drowned, dear? — Shel Silverstein

My final prayer:
O my body, make of me always a man who questions!"
- Frantz Fanon, "Black Skin, White Masks — Frantz Fanon

Folded hands may conceal a dagger --
Likewise a foe's tears. — Thiruvalluvar

As I begin to recognise that the Negro is the symbol of sin, I catch myself hating the Negro. But then I recognise that I am a Negro. There are two ways out of this conflict. Either I ask others to pay no attention to my skin, or else I want them to be aware of it. I try then to find value for what is bad
since I have unthinkingly conceded that the black man is the colour of evil. In order to terminate this neurotic situation, in which I am compelled to choose an unhealthy, conflictual solution, fed on fantasies, hostile, inhuman in short, I have only one solution: to rise above this absurd drama that others have staged around me, to reject the two terms that are equally unacceptable, and through one human being, to reach out for the universal.
When the Negro dives
in other words, goes under
something remarkable occurs. — 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

To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets. We smoked cigarettes and wore leather jackets. At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling conventions. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated.
But this strategy alone couldn't provide the distance I wanted, from Joyce or my past. After all, there were thousands of so-called campus radicals, most of them white and tenured and happily tolerant. No, it remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names. — Barack Obama