Directors like Satyajit Ray, Rossellini, Bresson, Buñuel, Forman, Scorsese, and Spike Lee have used non-professional actors preci...sely in order that the people we see on the screen may be scarcely more explained than reality itself. Professionals, except fo the greatest, usually play not just the necessary role, but an explanation of the role.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Collective guilt is borne by what is conventionally called the scapegoat. Now the scapegoat for white society--which is based on m...yths of progress, civilization, liberalism, education, enlightenment, refinement--will be precisely the force that opposes the expansion and the triumph of these myths. This brutal opposing force is supplied by the Negro.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say ...that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gain...s, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny.... And it is white.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I ascribe a basic importance to the phenomenon of language.... To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to gras...p the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of m...y ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Real socialism is inside man. It wasn't born with Marx. It was in the communes of Italy in the Middle Ages. You can't say it is fi...nished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »