Frantz Fanon Quotes

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

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

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

Variant: Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.
Source: The Wretched of the Earth

“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”

The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

“What matters is not to know the world but to change it.”

Variant: Oh my body, make of me a man who always questions!
Source: Black Skin, White Masks

“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.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

“In the World through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth

Frantz Fanon Quotes about the world

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

“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

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

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), pp. 38

“From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

“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.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 37.

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

"The Lived Experience of the Black Man"/"The Fact of Blackness"
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Frantz Fanon Quotes about people

“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.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth

“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.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth

“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.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 42.

“They realize at last that change does not mean reform, that change does not mean improvement.”

Source: Letter to Roger Tayeb, December 1961, as cited in Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971), p. 185.

Frantz Fanon Quotes

“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.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth

“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.”

as translated by Richard Philcox (2004), p. 9
The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 43.

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

“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe”

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

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

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

“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”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Ch.2, p. 60

“Violence is man re-creating himself.”

“Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”

“Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists.”

“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.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth

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

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

“Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks

“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.”

Introduction,Page 9
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

“At risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.”

Introduction,Page 8
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

“The black man wants to be white. The white man slaves to reach a human level.”

Introduction,page 8
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

“The destruction of the colonial world is no more and no less that the abolition of one zone, its burial in the depths of the earth or its expulsion from the country.”

Introduction,Page 9
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

“The serf is in essence different from the knight, but a reference to divine right is necessary to legitimize this statutory defense.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 41

“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.”

Source: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), p. 40

“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.”

Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

“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.”

Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

“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 anle to absorb all the cosmic efflucia.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), p. 97

“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.”

I am truly a ray of sunlight under the earth...
Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Ch. 2

“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.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Chapter 2, "The Woman of Color and the White Man", p. 41

“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.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), pp. 31

“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.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), p. 28-29

“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.”

Source: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), p. 28

“I said just above that South Africa has a racist structure. Now I shall go farther and say that Europe has a racist structure.”

Introduction,page 8
Black Skin, White Masks (1952)