"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 (Black Skin, White Masks)
"Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity."
— Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
"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 (Black Skin, White Masks)
"To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture."
— Frantz Fanon
tags: linguistics, politics, psychology
"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 (The Wretched of the Earth)
"O my body, make of me always a man who questions!"
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"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 a simply a question of relative strength."
— Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth)
"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 (The Wretched of the Earth)
"Violence is man re-creating himself. "
— 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
"When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone 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
tags:
"Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well."
— Frantz Fanon
"One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.
"
— Frantz Fanon
"Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"Mastery of language affords remarkable power."
— Frantz Fanon
"To speak...means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."
— Frantz Fanon
"[T]he 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 (The Wretched of the Earth)
"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 (Black Skin, White Masks)
"ô mon corps, fait toujours de moi un homme qui s'interroge."
— Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, White Masks)
"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 (Black Skin, White Masks)
