Happy birthday, Frantz Fanon! Here are some quotes from the philosopher, revolutionary, and writer.
“Mastery of language affords remarkable power.”
“When I write things like that, I am trying to touch my reader affectively, or in other words irrationally, almost sensually. For me, words have a charge. I find myself incapable of escaping the bite of a word, the vertigo of a question mark.”
“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.”
“There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinary sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.”
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
“The oppressed will always believe the worst about themselves.”
“Today I believe in the possibility of love; that is why I endeavor to trace its imperfections, its perversions.”
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
“To speak a language is to take on a world, a culture.”
“In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it.”
“O my body, make of me always a man who questions!”
“What matters is not to know the world but to change it.”
“To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnate it is their responsibility, and that if we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.”
“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for a variety of reasons, we can no longer breathe.”
“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.”
“Why write this book? No one has asked me for it. Especially those to whom it is directed.
Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.”
“I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.”
“Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent.”
“Man is motion toward the world and toward his like. A movement of aggression, which leads to enslavement or to conquest; a movement of love, a gift of self, the ultimate stage of what by common accord is called ethical orientation. Every consciousness seems to have the capacity to demonstrate these two components, simultaneously or alternatively. The person I love will strengthen me by endorsing my assumption of my personhood, while the need to earn the admiration or the love of others will erect a value-making superstructure on my whole vision of the world.”
“All forms of exploitation resemble one another. They all seek the source of their necessity in some edict of a Biblical nature. All forms of exploitation are identical because all of them are applied against the same ‘object’: man.”
“The basic confrontation which seemed to be colonialism versus anticolonialism, 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.”
“Colonialism is not a thinking machine, is not a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.”
