Top 80 Frantz Fanon Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

3. “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

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

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

10. “Wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized protected robbery.”

— Frantz Fanon

11. “Certain things need to be said if one is to avoid falsifying the problem.”

— Frantz Fanon

12. “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

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

— Frantz Fanon

14. “Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”

— Frantz Fanon

15. “The native must realize that colonialism never gives anything away for nothing.”

— 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. “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

18. “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

19. “Violence is man re-creating himself.”

— Frantz Fanon

20. “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

21. “The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labour but the result of organised, protected robbery. Rich people are no longer respectable people; they are nothing more than flesh eating animals, jackals and vultures which wallow in the people’s blood.”

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

23. “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

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

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

26. “There is a point at which methods devour themselves.”

— Frantz Fanon

27. “Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.”

— Frantz Fanon

28. “I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness.”

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

30. “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

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

— Frantz Fanon

32. “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

33. “He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me.”

— 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. “However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.”

— Frantz Fanon

36. “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

37. “One avoids Creolisms. Some families completely forbid Creole and mothers ridicule their children for speaking it.”

— Frantz Fanon

38. “The business of obscuring language is a mask behind which stands the much bigger business of plunder.”

— Frantz Fanon

39. “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

40. “No attempt must be made to encase man, for it is his destiny to be set free.”

— Frantz Fanon

41. “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

42. “For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.”

— Frantz Fanon

43. “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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

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

— Frantz Fanon

49. “We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.”

— Frantz Fanon

50. “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