Top 80 Frantz Fanon Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.”

— Frantz Fanon

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

— Frantz Fanon

54. “The consciousness of self is not the closing of a door to communication. Philosophic thought teaches us, on the contrary, that it is its guarantee. National consciousness, which is not nationalism, is the only thing that will give us an international dimension.”

— Frantz Fanon

55. “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

56. “Get this into your head: if violence were only a thing of the future, if exploitation and oppression never existed on earth, perhaps displays of nonviolence might relieve the conflict. But if the entire regime, even your nonviolent thoughts, is governed by a thousand-year-old oppression, your passiveness serves no other purpose but to put you on the side of the oppressors.”

— Frantz Fanon

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “There is no forgiveness when one who claims a superiority falls below the standard.”

— Frantz Fanon

61. “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

62. “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

63. “European opulence is literally a scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world. Europe’s well-being and progress were built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Arabs, Indians, and Asians. This we are determined never to forget.”

— Frantz Fanon

64. “The misfortune of man is that he was once a child.”

— Frantz Fanon

65. “The more the people understand, the more watchful they become, and the more they come to realize that finally everything depends on them and their salvation lies in their own cohesion, in the true understanding of their interests, and in knowing who their enemies are. The people come to understand that wealth is not the fruit of labor but the result of organized, protected robbery.”

— Frantz Fanon

66. “Fighting for the freedom of one’s people is not the only necessity. As long as the fight goes on you must enlighten not only the people but also, and above all, yourself on the full measure of man. You must retrace the paths of history, the history of man damned by other men, and initiate, bring about, the encounter between your own people and others.”

— Frantz Fanon

67. “What matters is not so much the color of your skin as the power you serve and the millions you betray.”

— Frantz Fanon

68. “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

69. “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

70. “And the day when our human race has fully matured, it will not define itself as the sum of the inhabitants of the globe, but as the infinite unity of their reciprocities.”

— Frantz Fanon

71. “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

72. “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

73. “What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.”

— Frantz Fanon

74. “What makes a bourgeoisie is not its attitude, taste, or manners. It is not even its aspirations. The bourgeoisie is above all the direct product of precise economic realities.”

— Frantz Fanon

75. “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

76. “As a man, I undertake to risk annihilation so that two or three truths can cast their essential light on the world.”

— Frantz Fanon

77. “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

78. “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

79. “The Third World today faces Europe like a colossal mass whose project should be to try to resolve the problems to which Europe has not been able to find the answers.”

— Frantz Fanon

80. “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

81. “It is the racist who creates the inferiorized.”

— Frantz Fanon

82. “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

83. “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

84. “And for me bourgeois society is any society that becomes ossified in a predetermined mold, stifling any development, progress, or discovery. For me bourgeois society is a closed society where it’s not good to be alive, where the air is rotten and ideas and people are putrefying. And I believe that a man who takes a stand against this living death is in a way a revolutionary.”

— Frantz Fanon

85. “I stop there, for who can tell me what beauty is?”

— Frantz Fanon

86. “We must not cultivate the spirit of the exceptional or look for the hero, another form of leader. We must elevate the people, expand their minds, equip them, differentiate them, and humanize them.”

— Frantz Fanon

87. “The colonized intellectual has invested his aggression in his barely veiled wish to be assimilated to the colonizer’s world. He has placed his aggression at the service of his own interests, his interests as an individual.”

— Frantz Fanon

88. “Jung locates the collective unconscious in the inherited cerebral matter. But there is no need to resort to the genes; the collective unconscious is quite simply the repository of prejudices, myths, and collective attitudes of a particular group.”

— Frantz Fanon

89. “In order to arrive at this notion of party we must first and foremost rid ourselves of the very Western, very bourgeois, and hence very disparaging, idea that the masses are incapable of governing themselves. Experience has proven in fact that the masses fully understand the most complex issues.”

— Frantz Fanon