Fanon Quotes & Sayings

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

When we revolt it's not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe — Frantz Fanon

You know full well we are exploiters. You know full well we have taken the gold and minerals and then oil from the "new continents," and shipped them back to the old metropolises. Not without excellent results in the shape of palaces, cathedrals, and centers of industry; and then when crisis loomed, the colonial markets were there to cushion the blow or divert it. Stuffed with wealth, Europe granted humanity de jure to all its inhabitants: for us, a man means an accomplice, for we have all profited from colonial exploitation. — Frantz Fanon

There is not occupation of territory on the one hand and independence of persons on the other. It is the country as a whole, its history, its daily pulsation that are contested, disfigured, in the hope of a final destruction. Under these conditions, the individual's breathing is an observed, an occupied breathing. It is a combat breathing. — Frantz Fanon

Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions! — Frantz Fanon

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

I speak of the Christian religion, and no one need be astonished. 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. And as we know, in this matter many are called but few chosen. — Frantz Fanon

Color is nothing, I do not even notice it, I know only one thing, which is the purity of my conscience and the whiteness of my soul. — Frantz Fanon

To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture. — 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."33 — 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, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. — Frantz Fanon

The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves. — Frantz Fanon

nationalize the tertiary sector. The bourgeoisie, who wants the spirit of lucre — Frantz Fanon

[Educated blacks] Society refuses to consider them genuine Negroes. The Negro is a savage, whereas the student is civilized. "You're us," and if anyone thinks you are a Negro he is mistaken, because you merely look like one. — Frantz Fanon

Mastery of language affords remarkable power. — Frantz Fanon

There is a dramatic conflict in what is commonly called the human sciences. Should we postulate a typical human reality and describe its psychic modalities, taking into account only the imperfections, or should we not rather make a constant, solid endeavor to understand man in an everchanging light? — Frantz Fanon

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, it is this other who remains the focus of his actions. His human worth and reality depend on this other and on his recognition by the other. It is in this other that the meaning of his life is condensed. — Frantz Fanon

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

For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted. — Frantz Fanon

Anti-Semitism hits me on the head: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being man. I cannot disassociate myself from the future that is proposed for my brother. — Frantz Fanon

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

Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent. — Frantz Fanon

Capitalist exploitation and cartels and monopolies are the enemies of underdeveloped countries. On the other hand a regime which is completely oriented towards the people as a whole and based on the principle that man is the most precious of all possessions, will allow us to go forward more quickly and more harmoniously, and thus make impossible that caricature of society where all economic and political power is held in the hands of a few who regard the nation as a whole with scorn and contempt. — Frantz Fanon

I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. 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

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

Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are
presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new
evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is
extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it
is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize,
ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief. — Frantz Fanon

Whiteness, Fanon asserts, has become a symbol of purity, of Justice, Truth, Virginity. It defi nes what it means to be civilized, modern and human — Anonymous

What matters is not to know the world but to change it. — Frantz Fanon

Once their rage explodes, they recover their lost coherence, they experience self-knowledge through reconstruction of themselves; from afar we see their war as the triumph of barbarity; but it proceeds on its own to gradually emancipate the fighter and progressively eliminates the colonial darkness inside and out. As soon as it begins it is merciless. Either one must remain terrified or become terrifying - which means surrendering to the dissociations of a fabricated life or conquering the unity of one's native soil. When the peasants lay hands on a gun, the old myths fade, and one by one the taboos are overturned: a fighter's weapon is his humanity. For in the first phase of the revolt killing is a necessity: killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free; — Frantz Fanon

Given Fanon's subsequent traumatic encounter with the white gaze ('Look, maman, a negro'), it is ironic that it was he and Manville who gazed at the children and could not take their eyes off them. They had never seen a girl with truly red hair, or such a blond boy, and they were fascinated. — David Macey

The passion with which native intellectuals defend the existence of their national culture may be a source of amazement; but those who condemn this exaggerated passion are strangely apt to forget that their own psyche and their own selves are conveniently sheltered behind a French or German culture which has given full proof of its existence and which is uncontested. — Frantz Fanon

Every race will have disagreements amongst themselves, but we must put aside our differences, and work together for the advancement of that race Sandra Forsythe — Frantz Fanon

It is true that if care is taken to use only a language that it's understood by graduates in law and economics, you can easily prove that the masses have to be managed from above. — Frantz Fanon

What matters is not so much the color of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray. — Frantz Fanon

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

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

The life of the nation is shot through with a certain falseness and hypocrisy, which are all the more tragic because they are so often subconscious rather than deliberate ... The soul of the people is putrescent, and until that becomes regenerate and clean, no good work can be done. — Frantz Fanon

To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people. — Frantz Fanon

Not so long ago the Earth numbered 2 billion inhabitants, i.e., 500 million men and 1.5 billion "natives." The first possessed the Word, the others borrowed it. — Frantz Fanon

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

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

The unveiled Algerian woman, who assumed an increasingly important place in revolutionary action, developed her personality, discovered the exalting realm of responsibility. The freedom of the Algerian people from then on became identified with woman's liberation, with her entry into history. This woman who, in the avenues of Algier or of Constantine, would carry the grenades or the submachine-gun chargers, this woman who tomorrow would be outraged, violated, tortured, could not put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behaviour of the past; this woman who was writing the heroic pages of Algerian history was, in so doing, bursting the bounds of the narrow in which she had lived without responsibility, and was at the same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman. — Frantz Fanon

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

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.
— 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

There is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language. — Frantz Fanon

The missionaries find it opportune to remind the masses that long before the advent of European colonialism the great African empires were disrupted by the Arab invasion. There is no hesitation in saying that it was the Arab occupation which paved the way for European colonialism; Arab imperialism commonly spoken of, and the cultural imperialism of Islam is condemned. — Frantz Fanon

The misfortune of man is that he was once a child. — 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

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 is simply a question of relative strength. — Frantz Fanon

Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists. — Frantz Fanon

An endless task, the cataloguing of reality. We accumulate facts, we discuss them, but with every line that is written, with every statement that is made, one has the feeling of incompleteness. — 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

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

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

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

Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well. — 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 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

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

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

There is a point at which methods devour themselves. — Frantz Fanon

Demanding yet denying the human condition makes for an explosive contradiction. And explode it does, as you and I know. And we live in an age of conflagration: it only needs the rising birth rate to worsen the food shortage, it only needs the newly born to fear living a little more than dying, and for the torrent of violence to sweep away all the barriers. In Algeria and Angola, Europeans are massacred on sight. This is the age of the boomerang, the third stage of violence: it flies right back at us, it strikes us and, once again, we have no idea what hit us. — 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

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

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

Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone. I shouted my laughter to the
stars. — 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

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

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

At first glance it seems strange that the attitude of the anti-Semite can be equated with that of the negrophobe. It was my philosophy teacher from the Antilles who reminded me one day: "When you hear someone insulting the Jews pay attention; he is talking about you." And I believed at the time he was universally right, meaning that I was responsible in my body and my soul for the fate reserved for my brother. Since then, I have understood that what he meant quite simply was the anti-Semite is inevitably a negrophobe. — 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

In the colonial countries, on the contrary, the policeman and the soldier, by their immediate presence and their frequent and direct action maintain contact with the native and advise him by means of rifle butts and napalm not to budge. It is obvious here that the agents of government speak the language of pure force — Frantz Fanon

One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it. — Frantz Fanon

I do battle for the creation
of a human world - that ism
a world of reciprocal recognition. — Frantz Fanon

There is no forgiveness when one who claims a superiority falls below the standard. — Frantz Fanon

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

To speak pidgin to a Negro makes him angry, because he himself is a pidgin-nigger-talker. But, I will be told, there is no wish, no intention to anger him. I grant this; but it is just this absence of wish, this lack of interest, this indifference, this automatic manner of classifying him, imprisoning him, primitivizing him, decivilizing him, that makes him angry.
If a man who speaks pidgin to a man of color or an Arab does not see anything wrong or evil in such behavior, it is because he has never stopped to think. — Frantz Fanon

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

O my body, make of me always a man who questions! — Frantz Fanon

There is a psychological phenomenon that consists in the belief that the world will open to the extent to which frontiers are broken down. — Frantz Fanon

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 people like me, they like me "in spite of my color." When they dislike me; they point out that it isn't because of my color. Either way, I am locked in to the infernal circle. — Frantz Fanon

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

Violence is man re-creating himself. — Frantz Fanon

Colinialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natrual resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply. — Frantz Fanon

Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent. — 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

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

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 colonized, underdeveloped man is a political creature in the most global sense of the term. Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth — Frantz Fanon

For me words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question-mark. — Frantz Fanon

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

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