Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

157. “The need to forgive the officer would not have moved me, because even then, in some inchoate form, 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

158. “I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago – the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth – loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

159. “Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about his world is meant to be.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

161. “I know that “gentrification” is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

162. “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... The library was open, unending, free.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

163. “These new people are, like us, a modern invention. But unlike us, their new name has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white – Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish – and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myths.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

164. “There was no peace in slavery, for every day under the rule of another is a day of war.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

165. “Dad called it “enlightenment” but to me, it just felt lonely.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

166. “Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I’d never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival’s sake. I must survive for you.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

167. “Our current politics tell you that should you fall victim to such an assault and lose your body, it must somehow be your fault. Trayvon Martin’s hoodie got him killed. Jordan Davis’s loud music did the same.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

168. “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people. Here.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

169. “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

170. “You are the bearer of a body more fragile than any other in this country. What I want you to know is that this is not your fault, even if it is ultimately your responsibility.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

171. “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

172. “And no one would be brought to account for this destruction, because 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. The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

173. “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

174. “And I know that there are black boys and black girls out there lost in a Bermuda triangle of the mind or stranded in the doldrums of America, some of them treading and some of them drowning, never feeling and never forgetting. The most precious thing I had then is the most precious thing I have now – my own curiosity. That is the thing I knew, even in the classroom, they could not take from me. That is the thing that buoyed me and eventually plucked me from the sea.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

175. “And by then, I well knew what would be done upon that land, how the sin of theft would be multiplied by the sin of bondage.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

176. “Keep your end of the yard clean and leave the justice to the Lord.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

177. “What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could – and must – fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name – that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

178. “One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra number 2 pencil. Make no mistakes. But you are human and you will make mistakes. You will misjudge. You will yell. You will drink too much. You will hang out with people you shouldn’t. Not all of us can always be Jackie Robinson – not even Jackie Robinson was always Jackie Robinson.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

180. “Americans believe in the reality of “race” as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism – the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them – inevitably follows from this inalterable condition.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

181. “Considering segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, Richard Nixon concluded, “Strom is no racist.” There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally. In the era of mass lynching, it was so difficult to find who, specifically, served as executioner that such deaths were often reported by the press as having happened “at the hands of persons unknown.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

182. “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

183. “The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

184. “Fail in the streets and the crews would catch you slipping and take your body. Fail in the schools and you would be suspended and sent back to those same streets, where they would take your body.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

185. “The Quality kept their Tasked ones close the way a lady keeps her clutch, closer even, for this was a time in our history when the most valuable thing a man could own, in all of America, was another man.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

186. “Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be “twice as good.” Hence the need for a special “talk” administered to black boys about how to be extra careful when relating to the police.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

187. “Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy – in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

188. “But having been down, and having seen my share of those who are up, I tell you, Robert Ross, I would live down here among my losses, among the muck and mess of it, before I would ever live among those who are in their own kind of muck, but are so blinded by it they fancy it pure. Ain’t no pure, Robert. Ain’t no clean.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

189. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

192. “Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

193. “I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

194. “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

195. “She knew that I had no idea how close I was, would always be, to the edge, how easily boys like me were erased in absurd, impractical ways. One minute we were tossing snowballs at taxis, firing up in front the 7-Eleven, speeding down side streets and the next we’re surrounded by unholstered guns, a false move away from going down. I would always be a false move away. I would always have the dagger at my throat.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

196. “If you’re black, you were born in jail,” Malcolm said. And I felt the truth of this in the blocks I had to avoid, in the times of day when I must not be caught walking home from school, in my lack of control over my body.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

197. “But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic – an orc, troll, or gorgon... This was the attempt to commit a shameful act while escaping all sanction, and I raise it to show you that there was no golden era when evildoers did their business and loudly proclaimed it as such.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

198. “Mostly they all were products of single parents, and in the most tragic category – black boys, with no particular criminal inclinations but whose very lack of direction put them in the crosshairs of the world.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

200. “I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates