15 Quotes by Albert Memmi

Travel if you wish, taste strange dishes, gather experience in dangerous activities, but see that your soul remains your own. Do not become a stranger to yourself, for you are lost from that day on; you will have no peace if there is not, somewhere within you, a corner of certainty, calm waters where you can take refuge in sleep.

It is not easy to escape mentally from a concrete situation, to refuse its ideology while continuing to live with its actual relationships.

Le racisme est la dévalorisation profitable d'une différence" ou, plus techniquement, "le racisme est la valorisation, généralisée et définitive, de différences réelles ou imaginaires, au profit de l'accusateur et au détriment de sa victime, afin de légitimer une agression".

To be sure, the church has greatly assisted the colonialist; backing his ventures, helping his conscience, contributing to the acceptance of colonization even by the colonized.

Colonial racism is built from three major ideological components: One, the gulf between the culture of the colonialist and the colonized: two, the exploitation of these differences for the benefit of the coloniast; three, the use of these supposed differences as standards of absolute fact.

Nothing could better justify the colonizer's privileged position than industry, and nothing could better justify tge colonised 's destitution than his laziness. The mythical potrait of the colonized therefore includes an unbelievable laziness, and that of the colonizer suggests that employing the colonized is not very profitable, thereby authorizing his reasonable wages.

The ' colonized do not know how to breath', the 'people here do not know how walk; they make little steps which do not get them ahead.

All efforts of the colonialist are directed toward maintaining thsi social immobility, and racism is the surest weapon this aim. Racism appears then, not as an accidental detail but a subconsubstantial part of colonialism.

The colonialst as the custodian of the values of civilization and history, he accomplishes a mission; he has the immense merit of bringing light to the colonized's ignominious darkness.