Aimé Césaire Quotes

I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out.

I have said — and this is something very different — that colonialist Europe has grafted modern abuse onto ancient injustice, hateful racism onto old inequality.

In the whole world no poor devil is lynched, no wretch is tortured, in whom I too am not degraded and murdered.

Culture is everything. Culture is the way we dress, the way we carry our heads, the way we walk, the way we tie our ties – it is not only the fact of writing books or building houses.

The weakness of most men they do not know how to become a stone or tree.

There’s room for everyone at the rendezvous of victory.

Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze.

It is no use painting the foot of the tree white, the strength of the bark cries out from beneath the paint.

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

And let me die suddenly, to be born again in the revelation of beauty….And the revelation of beauty is the wisdom of the ancestors.

I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.

A man screaming is not a dancing bear. Life is not a spectacle.