Fervor is the weapon of choice of the impotent. |
For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. |
He who is reluctant to recognize me opposes me. |
However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white. |
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language. To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization. |
I made up my mind to laugh myself to tears, but laughter had become impossible. |
In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. |
The life of the nation is shot through with a certain falseness and hypocrisy, which are all the more tragic because they are so often subconscious rather than deliberate ... The soul of the people is putrescent, and until that becomes regenerate and clean, no good work can be done. |
There is a point at which methods devour themselves. |
Violence is man re-creating himself. |
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary. |
When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men. |