Aimé Césaire

“A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization.”

“Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.”

“It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism.”

“The new name for God is Action.”

“A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization.”

“My mouth shall be the mouth of those calamities that have no mouth, my voice the freedom of those who break down in the solitary confinement of despair.”

“For it is not true that the work of man is finished... The work of man is only just beginning.”

“No race holds a monopoly on beauty, intelligence, or strength.”

“Poetic knowledge is born in the great silence of scientific knowledge.”

“I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement.”

“And at the end of the small hours, this country without a stele, these roads without a memory, this land without a testament.”

“A man who screams is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.”

“Europe is indefensible.”

“Négritude, in my eyes, is not a philosophy. Négritude is not a metaphysics... It is a way of living history within history.”

“Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk...”

“Look, I know that I have a heart, and I know that it is not made of stone.”