Marie Lee > Marie's Quotes

“Superiority? Inferiority?
Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“Get used to me, I am not getting used to anyone.” I shouted my laughter to the
stars.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“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, Black Skin, White Masks

“When someone strives & 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, Black Skin, White Masks

“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

“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

“The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“What matters is not to know the world but to change it.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“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, Black Skin, White Masks

“The most complicated skill is to be simple.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“The greatest wealth is to live content with little.”
― Plato

“Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable. And education, too, is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
― Hannah Arendt

“And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.”
― Hannah Arendt

“Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition