Aime Cesaire Quotes
Aime Cesaire was a Martinican poet, playwright, and philosopher and a co-founder of the Negritude movement. Studying in Paris in the 1930s alongside Leopold Senghor and Leon Damas, he articulated Negritude as the affirmation of black African and diasporic culture against the universal claims of European civilization. The quotes below are attributed to Aime Cesaire, organized by topic.
Browse Aime Cesaire by topic
Aime Cesaire on Death
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“Khrushchev’s revelations concerning Stalin are enough to have plunged all those who have participated in communist activity, to whatever degree, into an abyss of shock, pain, and shame (or, at least, I hope so). The dead, the tortured, the executed—no, neither posthumous rehabilitations, nor national funerals, nor official speeches can overcome them. These are not the kind of ghosts that one can ward off with a mechanical phrase. From now on, they will show up as watermarks in the very substance of the system.”
Wikiquote
Aime Cesaire on Freedom
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“My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the prison holes of despair.”
p. 13
Aime Cesaire on Knowledge
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“What he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”
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“What am I driving at? At this idea: that no one colonizes innocently, that no one colonizes with impunity either; that a nation which colonizes, that a civilization which justifies colonization—and therefore force—is already a sick civilization, a civilization that is morally diseased, that irresistibly, progressing from one consequence to another, one repudiation to another, calls for its Hitler, I mean its punishment.”
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“Colonization, I repeat, dehumanizes even the most civilized man; that colonial activity, colonial enterprise, colonial conquest, which is based on contempt for the native and justified by that contempt, inevitably tends to change him who undertakes it; that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal. It is this result, this boomerang effect of colonization, that I wanted to point out.”
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“It is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.”
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“With the exception of Yugoslavia , in numerous European countries—in the name of socialism —usurping bureaucracies that are cut off from the people (bureaucracies from which it is now proven that nothing can be expected) have achieved the pitiable wonder of transforming into a nightmare what humanity has for so long cherished as a dream: socialism.”
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“I believe I have said enough to make it clear that it is neither Marxism nor communism that I am renouncing, and that it is the usage some have made of Marxism and communism that I condemn. That what I want is that Marxism and communism be placed in the service of black peoples , and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism.”
Wikiquote
Aime Cesaire on Life
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“Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of miseries is not a proscenium , a man screaming is not a dancing bear.”
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“The details supplied by Khrushchev on Stalin’s methods ... lead us to believe in the existence in these countries of a veritable state capitalism , exploiting the working class in a manner not very different from the way the working class is used in capitalist countries.”
Wikiquote
Aime Cesaire on Politics
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“Colonization equals thingification.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“Europe is indefensible.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“I am of the race of those who are oppressed.”
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves, a society rich with all the productive power of modern times, warm with all the fraternity of olden days.”
Aime Cesaire on Truth
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Attributed to Aime Cesaire:
“Negritude is the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and our culture.”