Here are some of my favorite lines from the book:

     "You don't dabble in physics without being perfectly conversant with the laws governing material bodies; you don't practice psychological warfare if you're incapable of identifying yourself completely with your opponent."

     "The complex of the former victim of colonization, but also of the colored man in relation to the white, of the champion of the undernourished, disorganized third world, for whom dreams take the place of ideas against a clear-minded and contemptuous West overflowing with riches.
      If I were a Hindu or an Arab or an Indonesian, I would never stop trying to overcome this Western world. But this world is order and I am disorder, strength whereas I am weakness. So I would play on its disparity, its lassitude, its generosity, its guilt complex…What a powerful lever such hatred could be! We people who have lost the art of hating are lost!"

      "A certain form of life had become necessary to him. Nowadays it consisted merely of an aimless and fruitless commotion, which still tried to justify itself by the implementation of some great project or other which was almost always doomed by the rapid evolution of the world."

     "The old Africa is still holding out, in certain places she's even rising from her ashes. All the same she's doomed. A pity from the picturesque point of view, a pity also for these millions of detribalized wretches for whom no new structure has been prepared. With his staff and lion-skin the Mwata Motu certainly has a different bearing from Evariste Kasingo. But Evariste knows that other worlds exist, that the fate of Africa is more often than not decided far away, that the great palaver center is neither in E'ville nor Leo but in New York, where the UN hold their sessions."

     "One fights for a town as one fights for a woman. One leaves it but one doesn't let someone else take it from one…"

     "Therein lay the whole tragedy of the West: being able to build towns, but not loving them enough to be willing to die for them."

     "What makes a Baluba different from a Lunda, a Walloon from a Frenchman, a Fleming from a Dutchman? Nothing except that they believe in this difference…"

     "I'm only frank with women who interest me. The others deserve nothing but lies: it saves so much time!"

     "Stimulated by the idea of betraying those who were employing him, which enabled him to remain true to a few of his principles, or rather his techniques, la Ronciere went on reading."

     "What is a monster? The hangman is a monster, but also the judge and the man above the judge, and the man who starts a war…whichever side he is on. When you're fighting a war, you mustn't try to understand, you must simply obey. If you try to understand you start reasoning with the enemy and end up by coming round to his point of view. Then you're done for, because everyone has good reasons for behaving as he does."

     "The dead are all worth the same, whether they're heroes or cowards, because once they're dead they're not worth anything."