Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “But her beauty and stillness broke the balance in me. In my small apartment, she kissed me, and the ground opened up, swallowed me, buried me right there in that moment. How many awful poems did I write thinking of her? I know now what she was to me – the first glimpse of a space-bridge, a wormhole, a galactic portal off this bound and blind planet. She had seen other worlds, and she held the lineage of other worlds, spectacularly, in the vessel of her black body.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

102. “You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

103. “At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime product rendered by our stolen bodies – cotton – was America’s primary export.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

104. “I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us – Christians, Muslims, atheists – lived in this fear of this truth.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

105. “The tree of our family was parted – branches here, roots there – parted for their lumber.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

107. “She compared America to Rome. She said she thought the glory days of this country had long ago passed, and even those glory days were sullied: They had been built on the bodies of others. “And we can’t get the message,” she said. “We don’t understand that we are embracing our deaths.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

108. “The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me. Thus America’s problem is not its betrayal of “government of the people,” but the means by which “the people” acquired their names.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

109. “The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

110. “Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

112. “I did not know then that this is what life is – just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

113. “Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

114. “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

115. “I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

116. “But the Levittowns were, with Levitt’s willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted with protests and a burning cross. A neighbor who opposed the family said that Bill Myers was “probably a nice guy, but every time I look at him, I see $2,000 drop off the value of my house.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

117. “When our elders presented school to us, they did not present it as a place of high learning but as a means of escape from death and penal warehousing.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

118. “Even the Dreamers, lost in their great reverie, feel it, for it’s Billie they reach for in sadness, and Isley they hum in love, and Dre they yell in revelry, and Aretha the last sound they hear before dying.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

119. “The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

120. “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.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

121. “We would prefer to say that such people cannot exist, that there aren’t any,” writes Solzhenitsyn. “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good, or else that it’s a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

122. “When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life... The Dream smells like peppermint but tastes like strawberry shortcake. 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

123. “I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber,” Frederick Douglass told his audiences. “I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

124. “But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible – this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

125. “I had dreams back then. Big dumb dreams. Dead and gone.” “And what do you dream of now?” she asked. “After what I just came up from?” I said. “Breathing. I just dream of breathing.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

126. “The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

127. “One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error. I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

128. “Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

129. “The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

130. “No matter was the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

131. “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

132. “Soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

133. “Slavery is everyday longing, is being born into a world of forbidden victuals and tantalizing untouchables – the land around you, the clothes you hem, the biscuits you bake. You bury the longing, because you know where it must lead.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

134. “But all our phrasing – race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy – serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth. You must never look away from this.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

135. “We could not get out. The ground we walked was trip-wired. The air we breathed was toxic. The water stunted our growth. We could not get out. A year after I watched the boy with the small eyes pull out a gun, my father beat me for letting another boy steal from me. Two years later, he beat me for threatening my ninth-grade teacher. Not being violent enough could cost me my body. Being too violent could cost me my body. We could not get out.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

136. “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

137. “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

138. “Black-on black crime’ is jargon, violence on language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

139. “But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor – landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before – that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else’s dream.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

140. “We have made something down here. We have taken the one-drop rules of Dreamers and flipped them. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

141. “They were utterly fearless. I did not understand it until I looked out on the street. That was where I saw white parents pushing double-wide strollers down gentrifying Harlem boulevards in T-shirts and jogging shorts. Or I saw them lost in conversation with each other, mother and father, while their sons commanded entire sidewalks with their tricycles. The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

142. “I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

143. “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

144. “When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

145. “The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

146. “I didn’t always have things, but I had people – I always had people.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

147. “The truth of us was always that you were our ring. 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. Everything else was subordinate to this fact.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

148. “But now I understand the gravity of what I was proposing – that a four-year-old child be watchful, prudent, and shrewd, that I curtail your happiness, that you submit to a loss of time. And now when I measure this fear against the boldness that the masters of the galaxy imparted to their own children, I am ashamed.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

149. “For memory is the chariot, and memory is the way, and memory is the bridge from the curse of slavery to the boon of freedom.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

150. “I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates