We have to work at decolonizing our mentality and achieving happiness within the limits of sacrifice we should be willing to make. We have to recondition our people to accept themselves as they are, to not be ashamed of their real situation, to be satisfied with it, to glory in it, even.
The revolution and women’s liberation go together. We do not talk of women’s emancipation as an act of charity or out of a surge of human compassion. It is a basic necessity for the revolution to triumph. Women hold up the other half of the sky.
Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women. May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence. I hear the roar of women’s silence. I sense the rumble of their storm and feel the fury of their revolt.
We must learn to live the African way. It’s the only way to live in freedom and with dignity.
The enemies of a people are those who keep them in ignorance.
While revolutionaries as individuals can be murdered, you cannot kill ideas.
He who feeds you, controls you.
Without patriotic political education, a soldier is only a potential criminal.
The greatest difficulty we have faced is the neocolonial way of thinking that exists in this country. We were colonized by a country, France, that left us with certain habits. For us, being successful in life, being happy, meant trying to live as they do in France, like the richest of the French.
Inequality can be done away with only by establishing a new society, where men and women will enjoy equal rights, resulting from an upheaval in the means of production and in all social relations. Thus, the status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them.
I want people to remember me as someone whose life has been helpful to humanity.
May my eyes never see and my feet never take me to a society where half the people are held in silence.
You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness.
It took the madmen of yesterday for us to be able to act with extreme clarity today. I want to be one of those madmen. We must dare to invent the future.
When the people stand up, imperialism trembles.
The spirit is smothered, as it were, by ignorance, but so soon as ignorance is destroyed, spirit shine forth, like the sun when released from clouds.
We must dare to invent the future.
Comrades, there is no true social revolution without the liberation of women.
We make every effort to see that our actions live up to our words and be vigilant with regards to our behavior.
Never be ashamed of being African.