Top 100 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes
#1. What I am telling you is that you do not need to know to love, and it is right that you feel it all in any moment. And it is right that you see it through
that you are amazed, then curious, then belligerent, then heartbroken, then numb. You have the right to all of it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#2. 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
#3. When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#4. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#5. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature, the helpless agent of our world's physical laws.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#6. Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing "mere" about symbols.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#7. 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
#8. traveling as a pointless luxury, like blowing the rent check on a pink suit.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#10. The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#11. 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
#12. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#13. I almost never danced, as much as I wanted to. I was crippled by some childhood fear of my own body.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#14. 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
#15. but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#16. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in the schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#17. But the price of error is
higher for you than it is for
your countrymen, and so
that America might justify
itself, the story of a black
body's destruction must
always begin with his or
her error, real or imagined ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#18. The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#19. To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#20. 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
#21. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#22. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#23. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#24. And hell upon those who tell us to be twice as good and shoot us no matter.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#25. And they are torturing Muslims, and their drones are bombing wedding parties (by accident!), and the Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#26. Among the people in that room, all those centuries ago, my body, breakable at will, endangered in the streets, fearful in the schools, was not closest to the queen's but to her adviser's, who'd been broken down into a chair so that a queen, heir to everything she'd ever seen, could sit.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#27. Of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#28. Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#29. The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#30. And godless though I am, the fact of being human, the fact of possessing the gift of study, and thus being remarkable among all the matter floating through the cosmos, still awes me.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#31. It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#32. 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
#33. Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#34. I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#35. The universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#36. All this time you were growing into words and feelings; my beautiful brown boy, who would soon come into the knowledge, who would soon comprehend the edicts of his galaxy, and all the extinction-level events that regarded you with a singular and discriminating interest.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#37. 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
#38. The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#40. Should assaulting an officer of the state be a capital offense, rendered without trial, with the officer as judge and executioner? Is that what we wish civilization to be?
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#41. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#42. Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#43. I devoured the books because they were the rays of light peeking out from the doorframe, and perhaps past that door there was another world, one beyond the gripping fear that undergirded the Dream.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#44. Thandiwe, when they come for you, do not scream. Do not plead. Do not cry, for your cries are but song to them.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#45. When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought ...
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#46. To yell "black-on-black crime" is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#47. That wisdom is not unique to our people, but I think it has special meaning to those of us born out of mass rape, whose ancestors were carried off and divided up into policies and stocks.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#48. 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
#49. I am convinced that the Dreamers, at least the Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#50. When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth, giving opportunities to other people, it's only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#51. 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
#52. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I'd never had.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#53. She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#54. The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and girded me against the sheer terror of disembodiment.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#55. [E]mpathy - not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance - is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#56. 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
#57. I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#58. But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#59. I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#60. If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#61. I am not asking you as a white person to see yourself as an enslaver. I'm asking you as an American to see all of the freedoms that you enjoy and see how they are rooted in things that the country you belong to condoned or actively participated in the past.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#63. I had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. Instead I was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#64. Forget about intentions. What any institution, or its agents, "intend" for you is secondary.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#65. I wonder if this is it. If I have finally flown too far from home. I think of Ramonda and Ororo. Zuri and W'Kabi. Father and S'yan. But above all, I think of you. and I think of dying out here, of drifting out here, in search of but far away from you.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#66. When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#67. Whenever a woman smiled his way, she'd already begun dividing her life into trimesters.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#68. I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#69. Hate gives identity. The nigger, the fag, the bitch illuminate the border, illuminate what we ostensibly are not, illuminate the Dream of being white, of being a Man. We name the hated strangers and are thus confirmed in the tribe.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#70. your body, was as good as anyone's, because your blood was as precious as jewels, and it should never be sold for magic, for spirituals inspired by the unknowable hereafter.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#71. At conferences, black boys were assembled. At schools we were herded into auditoriums. At home, mothers summoned us to dinner tables, and there they delivered the news: Our time was short.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#72. The point of this language of "intention" and "personal responsibility" is broad exoneration. Mistakes were made. Bodies were broken. People were enslaved. We meant well. We tried our best. "Good intention" is a hall pass through history, a sleeping pill that ensures the Dream.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#73. I had believed myself superior to my ancestors. But all it took was the proper amount of pain for me to return to the traditions of old. For even thinking such a thing, I am sorry. I apologize to you as a Wakandian, as a human being, and I apologize to my nation.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#74. 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
#75. I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.'
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#76. Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?" Bellow quipped. Tolstoy was "white," and so Tolstoy "mattered," like everything else that was white "mattered.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#77. At football games the other students would cheer the star black running back, and then when a black player on the other team got the ball, they'd yell, "Kill that nigger! Kill that nigger!" They would yell this sitting right next to her, as though she really were not there.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#78. In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#79. This is the foundation of the Dream - its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#80. On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#81. In comics, you have to imagine what happens. I really loved it; I loved collecting. I loved following the adventures and figuring out what was going to happen next. I was a huge X-Men fan; I was a huge Spider-Man fan, and, to large degree, I remain one. It's literature for me; it's art.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#82. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#83. One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#84. I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#85. What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. Perhaps
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#86. 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.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#87. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#88. And I remember that I have come to bring you back, in the full ambition that it is you who will bring all of us back. What have you discovered here, Shuri?
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#89. The pursuit of knowledge was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#90. 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
#91. The Dreamers of today, would rather live white than live free. In the Dream they are Buck Rogers, Prince Aragorn, an entire race of Skywalkers. To awaken them is to reveal that they are an empire of humans and,
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#92. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#93. 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
#94. There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#95. The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#96. The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#97. You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#98. Among the Conscious, a man is only worth his latest reading.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#99. I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#100. My death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of "race," imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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