Aimé Césaire

“Beware, my body and my soul, beware above all of crossing your arms and assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, and a man who wails is not a dancing bear.”

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

“Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

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

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

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

A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization.

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

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

“Whether one likes it or not, the bourgeoisie, as a class, is condemned to take responsibility for all the barbarism of history, the tortures of the Middle Ages and the Inquisition, warmongering and the appeal to the raison d’Etat, racism and slavery, in short everything against which it protested in unforgettable terms at the time when, as the attacking class, it was the incarnation of human progress.”

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

“It takes all kinds to make a world.”

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

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

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

"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."

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

"When I turn on my radio, when I hear that Negroes have been lynched in America, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when I turn on my radio, when I hear that Jews have been insulted, mistreated, persecuted, I say that we have been lied to: Hitler is not dead; when, finally, I turn on my radio and hear that in Africa forced labor has been inaugurated and legalized, I say that we have certainly been lied to: Hitler is not dead."

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

"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."

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

"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."

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)

"Reason, I sacrifice you to the evening breeze."

—Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)