Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “You have seen all the wonderful life up above the tree-line, yet you understand that there is no real distance between you and Trayvon Martin, and thus Trayvon Martin must terrify you in a way that he could never terrify me. You have seen so much more of all that is lost when they destroy your body.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

52. “So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

53. “The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully. Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

54. “It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

56. “I wanted you to have your own life, apart from fear – even apart from me. I am wounded. I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

57. “There are people whom we do not fully know, and yet they live in a warm place within us, and when they are plundered, when they lose their bodies and the dark energy disperses, that place becomes a wound.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

58. “And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do. In America, the injury is not in being born with darker skin, with fuller lips, with a broader nose, but in everything that happens after.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

59. “I have searched for answers in nationalist myth, in classrooms, out on the streets, and on other continents. 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

60. “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,′ wrote Wiley. ‘Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

61. “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

62. “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

63. “It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

64. “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

65. “To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

66. “I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

67. “This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello – which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

68. “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

69. “Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America’s heresies – torture, theft, enslavement – are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

70. “I grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. There was no room for softness. But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else – that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

71. “The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

72. “But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

73. “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

74. “The essence of American racism is disrespect.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

75. “The writer, and that was what I was becoming, must be wary of every Dream and every nation, even his own nation. Perhaps his own nation more than any other, precisely because it was his own.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

76. “And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

77. “There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. But.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

78. “It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

80. “I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

81. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

83. “My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers – even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious” – as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

84. “Specifically, the host wished to know why I felt that white America’s progress, or rather the progress of those Americans who believe that they are white, was built on looting and violence. Hearing this, I felt an old and indistinct sadness well up in me. The answer to this question is the record of the believers themselves. The answer is American history.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

85. “But we must tell our stories, and not be ensnared by them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

86. “The masters could not bring water to boil, harness to horse or strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them. We had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

88. “I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

89. “I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was once a burial ground for the auctioned there. They built a department store over part of it and then tried to erect a government building over another part.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

90. “I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world. –.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

91. “Then the mother of the murdered boy rose, turned to you, and said, “You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid to be you.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

92. “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.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

93. “For Americans, the hardest part of paying reparations would not be the outlay of money. It would be acknowledging that their most cherished myth was not real.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

94. “You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance – no matter how improved – as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

95. “We are all our beautiful bodies and so must never be prostrate before barbarians, must never submit our original self, our one of one, to defiling and plunder.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

96. “Unfit for the schools, and in good measure wanting to be unfit for them, and lacking the savvy I needed to master the streets, I felt there could be no escape for me or, honestly, anyone else. The fearless boys and girls who would knuckle up, call on cousins and crews, and if it came to it, pull guns seemed to have mastered the streets. But their knowledge peaked at seventeen, when they ventured out of their parents’ homes and discovered that America had guns and cousins, too.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

97. “In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live – specifically, how do I live free in this black body?”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

98. “Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

99. “It’s a cruel thing to do to children, to raise them as though they are siblings, and then set them against each other so that one shall be queen and the other shall be a footstool.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

100. “It must have been around that time that I discovered an essay by Ralph Wiley in which he responded to Bellow’s quip. “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates