Ta'ah Quotes

We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I didn't always have things,
but I had people - I always
had people. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Enslaved" is what the plunderer does to a righteous woman but "a slave" is a righteous woman who has accepted the plunderer's law. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple - talk about class and hope no one notices. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The longer you drift the more you will learn. What you learn affects the kind of person you end up turning into. — Chang Ta-chun

Stay and get married, or travel the Ways." Loial grimaced ruefully. "Life is very unsettling with ta'veren for friends. — Robert Jordan

That he was outnumbered did not matter because the whole world had outnumbered him long ago, and what do numbers matter? — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Upon your feet you have ten toes, they look just like PO-TA-TOES! — Jeff Smith

I have long served virtue, And never ta'en wages of her. — John Webster

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I'd like ta kiss ya, but I just washed my hair. — Bette Davis

The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Why is it that what we do know can save us, but what we don't know can kill us? — T.A. Barron

It doesn't matter what you want," Toreth breathed into his ear. "All that matters is what I want. Say it. — Manna Francis

Putting forth the effort to succeed is (tan.ta.mount), tantamount to your success. — Jon Jones

They can ta'k our lives but they can never ta'k our freedom!' Now there's a battle cry not designed by a clear thinker — Terry Pratchett

The rhyme pad was a spell book - it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

We'd summoned you out of ourselves, and you were not given a vote. If only for that reason, you deserved all the protection we could muster. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

My impulses were not filled with unfailing virtue. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Life should be dealt with in small bites, large gulps will choke you. — TA Guimont

If he hated, he hated because it was human for the enslaved to hate the enslaver, natural as Prometheus hating the birds. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

APHETA (APHE'TA) n.s.[with astrologers.] The name of the plant, which is imagined to be the giver or disposer of life in a nativity.Dict. — Samuel Johnson

sometimes fail to walk the air — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Don't give up your life, preserve your life," he would say. "And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The essence of American racism is disrespect. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

A good bra is fine, but a great bra is life changing. It gives you the confidence of a homecoming queen. It's a tiara for your ta-tas. — Helen Ellis

Classroom Activities
1. Using felt and yarn, make a hand puppet of Clarence Thomas. Ta-da! You're Antonin Scalia! — Jon Stewart

It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

What I wanted was to put as much distance between you and that blinding fear as possible. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.' — Ta-Nehisi Coates

One racist act. It's all it takes. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Had any people, anywhere, ever been as sprawling and beautiful as us? — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. — Vladimir Nabokov

When you write, you're inside the project. You can't really think about the reception. It has to be worth it even if no one reads it. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

...should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You can't tolerate anybody attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with force. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

[E]mpathy - not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance - is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism. And I could no longer predict where I would find my heroes. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Here is how I take the measure of my progress in life: I imagine myself as I was, back there in — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

And you are here now, and you must live - and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else's country, but in your own home. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I almost never danced, as much as I wanted to. I was crippled by some childhood fear of my own body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The changes have awarded me a rapture that comes only when you can no longer be lied to, when you have rejected the Dream. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I think, as a writer, I'm in my own head. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

America understands itself as God's handiwork, but the black body is the clearest evidence that America is the work of men. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Racism is a physical experience. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

For me, my writing benefits from my experience. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would not go down alone. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I could have
you arrested!" Which is to
say: "I could take your
body. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Painting is saying "Ta" to God. — Stanley Spencer

It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present — Ta-Nehisi Coates

but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

Among the Conscious, a man is only worth his latest reading. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I don't want ta hear that kinda dirty talk comin' from you."
"What, fanny? Fanny fanny fanny! — Kami Garcia

Nowadays, you gots ta walk the street and watch your back,
Cause brothers with the gats don't be knowin' how to act. — Shyheim