Frantz Fanon Quotes

“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, The Wretched of the Earth

“My final prayer:
O my body, make of me always a man who questions!"
- Frantz Fanon, "Black Skin, White Masks”
― Frantz Fanon

“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, Black Skin, White Masks

“It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.”
― Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism

“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, The Wretched of the Earth

“Here, the mother country is satisfied to keep some feudal rulers in her pay; there, dividing and ruling she has created a native bourgeoisie, sham from beginning to end; elsewhere she has played a double game: the colony is planted with settlers and exploited at the same time. Thus Europe has multiplied divisions and opposing groups, has fashioned classes and sometimes even racial prejudices, and has endeavoured by every means to bring about and intensify the stratification of colonised societies. Fanon hides nothing: in order to fight against us the former colony must fight against itself: or, rather, the two struggles form part of a whole.”
― Jean-Paul Sarte

“In the heat of the battle, all internal barriers break down; the puppet bourgeoisie of businessmen and shopkeepers, the urban proletariat, which is always in a privileged position, the lumpen-proletariat of the shanty towns - all fall into line with the stand made by the rural masses, that veritable reservoir of a national revolutionary army; for in those countries where colonialism has deliberately held up development, the peasantry, when it rises, quickly stands out as the revolutionary class. For it knows naked oppression, and suffers far more from it than the workers in the towns, and in order not to die of hunger, it demands no less than a complete demolishing of all existing structures. In order to triumph, the national revolution must be socialist”
― Jean-Paul Sarte