Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Art was not an after-school special. Art was not motivational speaking. Art was not sentimental. It had no responsibility to be hopeful or optimistic or make anyone feel better about the world. It must reflect the world in all its brutality and beauty, not in hopes of changing it but in the mean and selfish desire to not be enrolled in its lie, to not be coopted by the television dreams, to not ignore the great crimes all around us.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

202. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

204. “A few weeks into our stay, I made a friend who wanted to improve his English as much as I wanted to improve my French. We met one day in the crowd in front of Notre Dame. We walked to the Latin Quarter. We walked to a wine shop. Outside the wine shop there was seating. We sat and drank a bottle of red. We were served heaping piles of meats, bread, and cheese. Was this dinner? Did people do this? I had not even known how to imagine it.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

205. “She’d gone from the warm quilt of memory to the cold library of fact.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

206. “They will try and pull you into all type of capers, but remember there is a price, always a price. You seen it on me when we went down. You seen it even today. There is a reason we forget. And those of us who remember, well, it is hard on us. It exhausts us.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

208. “It is to point out that at this late hour, the totems of the empire of slavery – chief among them, its flag – still enjoy an honored place in the homes, and public spaces, of self-professed patriots and vulgar lovers of “freedom.” It is to understand what it means to live in a country that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

209. “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

210. “My understanding of the world was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

211. “My enlightened racial consciousness demands that I reject the so-called greatness of William Faulkner and William Shakespeare. I don’t have time for any of that Hamlet jive – but Marvel superheroes are super cool.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

212. “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

213. “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. 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

214. “This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

215. “Humans also tend to find community to be pleasurable, and within the boundaries of community relationships, words – often ironic and self-deprecating – are always spoken that take on other meanings when uttered by others.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

216. “Time would come when gold would outweigh blood. But this was still Virginia of old, where a dubious God held that those who would offer a man for sale were somehow more honorable than those who effected that sale.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

217. “I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

218. “It did not occur to me that writing is always some form of interpretation, some form of translating the specificity of one’s roots or expertise or even one’s own mind into language that can be absorbed and assimilated into the consciousness of a broader audience.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

219. “To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

220. “But he said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. “To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn’t mean that everything is going to go in a smooth, direct, straight line,” he said. “It goes forward sometimes, sometimes it goes back, sometimes it goes sideways, sometimes it zigs and zags.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

221. “The Civil War is a story for white people – acted out by white people, on white people’s terms – in which blacks feature strictly as stock characters and props.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

223. “Nothing in the record of human history argues for divine morality, and a great deal argues against it. What we know is that good people very often suffer terribly, while the perpetrators of horrific evil backstroke through all the pleasures of the world. There is no evidence that the score is ever evened in this life or any after.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

224. “For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery, when it is they themselves who are savages, who are Mordred, who are the Dragon, in Camelot’s clothes. And at that moment of revelation, of understanding, running is not a thought, not even as a dream, but a need, no different than the need to flee a burning house.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

225. “I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

226. “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

227. “The warlords of history are still kicking our heads in, and no one, not our fathers, not our Gods, is coming to save us.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

228. “An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality – it’s a double standard.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

229. “There were distinct advantages to black atheism, to a disbelief in dreams and moral appeal. First, it removed the weight of believing that “white people,” en masse, were interested listeners. “White people,” en masse, are not. They are – like any other people – mostly self-interested, which is why mass appeals to conscience, minus some compelling, existential threat, generally end in disappointment.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

230. “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

231. “The civil rights generation is exiting the American stage – not in a haze of nostalgia but in a cloud of gloom, troubled by the persistence of racism, the apparent weaknesses of the generation following in its wake, and the seeming indifference of much of the country to black America’s fate.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

232. “Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say – that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

234. “Terrorism carried the day. Federal troops withdrew from the South in 1877. The dream of Reconstruction died. For the next century, political violence was visited upon blacks wantonly, with special treatment meted out toward black people of ambition. Black schools and churches were burned to the ground. Black voters and the political candidates who attempted to rally them were intimidated, and some were murdered.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

235. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

236. “Having preserved the Union and saved white workers from competing with slave labor, the North could magnanimously acquiesce to such Confederate meretriciousness and the concomitant irrelevance of the country’s blacks. That interpretation served the North too, for it elided uncomfortable questions about the profits reaped by the North from Southern cotton, as well as the North’s long strategy of appeasement and compromise, stretching from the Fugitive Slave Act back to the Constitution itself.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

237. “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

238. “Obama’s greatest misstep was born directly out of his greatest insight. Only Obama, a black man who emerged from the best of white America, and thus could sincerely trust white America, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. And yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

239. “If women, as a gender, must suffer the constant evaluations and denigrations of men, black women must suffer that, plus a broad dismissal from the realm of what American society deems to be beautiful. But Michelle Obama is beautiful in the way that black people know themselves to be. Her prominence as first lady directly attacks a poison that diminishes black girls from the moment they are capable of opening a magazine or turning on a television.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

240. “Five years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse” invited the damnation of history. Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

241. “Perhaps after a serious discussion and debate – the kind that HR 40 proposes – we may find that the country can never fully repay African Americans. But we stand to discover much about ourselves in such a discussion – and that is perhaps what scares us. The idea of reparations is frightening not simply because we might lack the ability to pay. The idea of reparations threatens something much deeper – America’s heritage, history, and standing in the world.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

242. “One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

243. “In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

245. “From the White House down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr had a father,. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

246. “Bored whites were barbarian whites. While they played at aristocrats, we were their well-appointed and stoic attendants. But when they tired of dignity, the bottom fell out. New games were anointed and we were but pieces on the board. It was terrifying. There was no limit to what they might do at this end of the tether, nor what my father would allow them to do.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

248. “Power makes slaves of masters, for it cuts them away from the world they claim to comprehend. But I have given up my power, you see, given it up, so that now I might begin to see.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

249. “Even when she swung her broom at us, I sensed the depth of that loss, her pain, a rage that she, unlike the rest of us, refused to secret away, and I found that rage to be true and correct. She was not the meanest woman at Lockless, but the most honest.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates