"The first fight of the colonized is to reclaim the right to exist."

"I am black; I am in total fusion with the world, in sympathetic affinity with the earth, losing my id in the heart of the cosmos -- and the white man, however intelligent he may be, is incapable of un…"

"Imperialism leaves behind it, here and there, little clusters of Europeans who, living in an unreal way, begin to feel the need of a fictive superstructure which conceals their alienation."

"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."

"The greatest danger that threatens humanity is the existence of a zone of nonbeing, a zone of nothingness."