Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Ta-Nehisi Coates on Wise Famous Quotes.

We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.

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

The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake.

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

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

Fully 60 percent of all young black men who drop out of high school will go to jail. This should disgrace the country. But it does not,

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

Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner.

Soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.

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

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.

Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.

I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.

The robbery of time is not measured in lifespans but in moments.

The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.

I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay.

Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.

Why - for us and only us - is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies?

If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.

We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.

This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.

The universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks.

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

Our world is physical. Learn to play defense - ignore the head and keep your eyes on the body.

To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.

I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.

Race is the child of racism, not the father.

The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.

What did I know of loving anything, beyond a longing, beyond being biased in one woman's direction.

Thandiwe, when they come for you, do not scream. Do not plead. Do not cry, for your cries are but song to them.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose

Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.

But a great number of educators spoke of "personal responsibility" in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility.

My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.

Power lies not in what a king does, but in what his subjects believe he might do.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.

Hate gives identity.

Hmm... 'our' country? I have not spoken in this manner in some years. But Wakanda is my home. Wakanda is our home.

Believed merely a week earlier, ideas I had taken from one

To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book.

You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.

I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake.

Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream. An

Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white.

All my life I'd heard people
tell their black boys and
black girls to "be twice as
good," which is to say
"accept half as much.

Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.

You can no more be black like I am black than I could be black like your grandfather was.

Where others saw America in lovely columns, marvels of engineering, and refined democrats, Dad saw only masks concealing the heralds of woe.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy.

I learned this living among a people whom I would never have chosen, because the privileges of being black are not always self-evident.

This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others ...

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.

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

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

The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.

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

Among the Conscious, a man is only worth his latest reading.

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

What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.

You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you.

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

Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed.

The entire narrative of this country argues against the truth of who you are.

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

I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate.

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.

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.

Of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization

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

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

I think, as a writer, I'm in my own head.

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

He was born-again, a state I did not share but respected.

You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do.

When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.

I don't so much hope that any reader "agrees" with me, as I hope to haunt them, to trouble their sense of how things actually are.

You have the right to every end of your exploration and no motherfucker anywhere can tell you otherwise ...

And I knew then that I had failed. And I remembered that I had expected to fail.

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

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.

African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning.

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

One racist act. It's all it takes.

And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter.

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.

I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.

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

sometimes fail to walk the air

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

Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?

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

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

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

The loudest of doomsayers, so often, carry the weightiest of sin.

This need to be always on guard was an unmeasured expenditure of energy, the slow siphoning of the essence.