The Wretched of the Earth

by Frantz Fanon

All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinkets. All those discourses appear a jumble of dead words. Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged.

In the colonial context there is no truthful behavior. And good is quite simply what hurts them most.

The nationalist political parties never insist on the need for confrontation precisely because their aim is not the radical overthrow of the system.

force is no mere act of the will, but requires very real preliminary conditions before it can come into operation,

between oppressors and oppressed, force is the only solution.

For the colonized subject, objectivity is always directed against him.

The work of the colonist is to make even dreams of liberty impossible for the colonized. The work of the colonized is to imagine every possible method for annihilating the colonist.

European opulence is literally a scandal for it was built on the backs of slaves, it fed on the blood of slaves, and owes its very existence to the soil and subsoil of the underdeveloped world.

If working conditions are not modified it will take centuries to humanize this world which the imperialist forces have reduced to the animal level.

in colonial territories the proletariat is the kernel of the colonized people most pampered by the colonial regime.

Insurrection disorients the political parties. Their doctrine has always claimed the ineffectiveness of any confrontation and their very existence serves to condemn any idea of revolt.

Let us build a common front against the oppressor and let us reinforce it with armed struggle.

Consciousness stumbles upon partial, finite, and shifting truths.

Violence alone, perpetrated by the people, violence organized and guided by the leadership, provides the key for the masses to decipher social reality.

Because it is obsessed with its immediate interests, because it cannot see further than the end of its nose, the national bourgeoisie proves incapable of achieving simple national unity and incapable of building the nation on a solid, constructive foundation.

Colonialism, which the birth of African unity had trembling on its foundations, is now back on its feet, and now undertakes to break this will to unify by taking advantage of every weak link in the movement.

Within the same nation, religion divides the people and sets the spiritual communities, fostered and encouraged by colonialism and its apparatus, at odds with each other.

the bourgeois ideology that proclaims all men to be essentially equal, manages to remain consistent with itself by urging the subhuman to rise to the level of Western humanity that it embodies.