Fanon Quotes

#1. 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

#2. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

#4. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

#6. 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

#7. nationalize the tertiary sector. The bourgeoisie, who wants the spirit of lucre

Frantz Fanon

#8. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

#11. 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

#12. There is no forgiveness when one who claims a superiority falls below the standard.

Frantz Fanon

#13. 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

#14. He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me.

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. [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

#19. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

#21. To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

#23. Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.

Frantz Fanon

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.

Frantz Fanon

#27. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

#29. 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

#30. There is a point at which methods devour themselves.

Frantz Fanon

#31. Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.

Frantz Fanon

#32. 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

#33. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, # WeCantBreathe .

Frantz Fanon

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free.

Frantz Fanon

#37. O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

Frantz Fanon

#38. 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

#39. I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness

Frantz Fanon

#40. For violence, like Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted.

Frantz Fanon

#41. 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

#42. National liberation, national renaissance, the restoration of nationhood to the people, commonwealth: whatever may be the headings used or the new formulas introduced, decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.

Frantz Fanon

#43. What matters is not to know the world but to change it.

Frantz Fanon

#44. For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.

Frantz Fanon

#45. 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

#46. Fervor is the weapon of choice for the impotent.

Frantz Fanon

#47. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

#49. 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

#50. 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

#51. In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

#53. 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

#54. The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much greater business of plunder.

Frantz Fanon

#55. Violence is man re-creating himself.

Frantz Fanon

#56. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

#60. 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

#61. The militant girl, in adopting new patterns of conduct, could not be judged by traditional standards. Old values, sterile and infantile phobias disappeared.

Frantz Fanon

#62. 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

#63. One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.

Frantz Fanon

#64. Superiority? Inferiority?
Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?

Frantz Fanon

#65. Wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery.

Frantz Fanon

#66. 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

#67. There is an extraordinary power in the possession of a language.

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

#69. They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement.

Frantz Fanon

#70. 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

#71. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

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

Frantz Fanon

#77. What matters is not so much the color of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.

Frantz Fanon

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. Mastery of language affords remarkable power.

Frantz Fanon

#81. I do battle for the creation
of a human world - that ism
a world of reciprocal recognition.

Frantz Fanon

#82. 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

#83. The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

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

Frantz Fanon

#86. Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions!

Frantz Fanon

#87. 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