Frantz Fanon Quotes on Freedom
Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961) gave anticolonial political philosophy one of its most uncompromising statements of revolutionary freedom. The central argument is that the colonial situation does not admit of partial reform within its own categories — the colonized’s full humanity can be reclaimed only through the violent overthrow of the colonial structure that has organized the dehumanization, and the corresponding national consciousness that emerges through revolutionary struggle is the necessary precondition of an authentically free postcolonial life. The framework, drawing on Sartrean phenomenology, Hegelian master-slave dialectics, and Fanon’s own clinical psychiatric work in colonial Algeria, shaped the Algerian and broader Third World liberation movements and remains a principal text of the contemporary philosophy of race.
Quotes
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.”
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there for the meaning of my destiny.”
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“The colonized man finds his freedom in and through violence.”
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Attributed to Frantz Fanon:
“What matters now is not to know the world but to change it.”
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“We are nothing on earth if we are not in the first place the slaves of a cause, the cause of the peoples, the cause of justice and liberty .”
Letter to Roger Tayeb, December 1961, as cited in Peter Geismar, Fanon (1971), p. 185. -
“The black man wants to be white . The white man slaves to reach a human level.”
Black Skin, White Masks(1952) | Introduction, page 9