A government or a party gets the people it deserves and sooner or later a people gets the government it deserves.
Frantz FanonRead
Introducing someone as a "Negro poet with a University degree" or again, quite simply, the expression, "a great black poet." These ready-made phrases, which seem in a common-sense way to fill a need-or have a hidden subtlety, a permanent rub.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote critiques the labeling of individuals by race and education, suggesting it obscures their true identity.
Frantz Fanon addresses the problematic nature of categorizing human beings through simplistic labels such as 'Negro poet' or 'great black poet'. These terms, while seemingly descriptive, reduce complex individuals to mere stereotypes that may carry both overt and subtle implications, overshadowing their unique contributions and identities with societal prejudices.
Themes
IdentityLabelsRacePoetrySociety
In practice
Example use cases
During a literary panel discussion on the representation of race in poetry.
More from Frantz Fanon
All quotes →When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.
Frantz FanonRead
Certain things need to be said if one is to avoid falsifying the problem.
Frantz FanonRead
I want the world to recognize with me the open door of every consciousness
Frantz FanonRead
The gaze that the colonized subject casts at the colonist's sector is a look of lust, a look of envy. Dreams of possession. Every type of possession; of sitting at the colonist's table and sleeping in his bed, preferably with his wife. The colonized man is an envious man.
Frantz FanonRead
Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.
Frantz FanonRead
Similar quotes
I had four hundred thousand pages of continental philosophy and lit theory in my head. And by God, I was going to use it to prove to him that I was smarter than he was.
David Foster WallaceRead
Life doesn't do anything to you. It only reveals your spirit.
John C. MaxwellRead
Great men are almost always bad men.
Lord ActonRead
There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.
George Bernard ShawRead
After the Manchu government had carried on wars with foreign nations and had been defeated, China was forced to sign many unequal treaties. Foreign nations are still using these treaties to bind China, and as a result, China fails at whatever she attempts.
Sun Yat-SenRead
But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world's ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.
Truman CapoteRead