Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “But it’s all horse and no saddle.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

252. “So many of us who went, went with dignity and respect. And it occurred to me how absurd it was to cling to morality when surrounded by people who had none.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

253. “To secure the White House, Obama needed to be a Harvard-trained lawyer with a decade of political experience and an incredible gift for speaking to cross sections of the country; Donald Trump needed only money and white bluster.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

254. “It is important to remember the inconsequence of one’s talent and hard work and the incredible and unmatched sway of luck and fate. I knew it even as it was happening. I felt that I had not changed, but the world was changing around me. It was as if I had spent my years jiggling a key into the wrong lock. The lock was changed.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

255. “But this moment here when you speak as such to those who loved you when you was most frail, you gonna regret. Boy like you should be more careful with his words. Never know when they the last ones he might put upon a person.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

256. “In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

257. “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

258. “I felt in that moment something low and beautiful. Something born down here on the street and all the streets of America. Something nurtured and birthed out of the warrens. It was the warmth of the muck. It was the relief of the low born. The facing of the facts. The flight from quality. The gravity and excrement of the true world where we all live.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

259. “You deserved so much more, little flower. You deserved a Wakanda that cherished you.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

260. “Still. There are parts of life that can’t be gotten out of, and I have had to learn, here, that we are all, at the end, held somehow. Just that up here you get to choose by who and by what.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

261. “I did not ask. Later I felt bad about this. I knew, even then, that whenever I nodded along in ignorance, I lost an opportunity, betrayed the wonder in me by privileging the appearance of knowing over the work of finding out.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

262. “She alluded to 12 Years a Slave. “There he was,” she said, speaking of Solomon Northup. “He had means. He had a family. He was living like a human being. And one racist act took him back. And the same is true of me. I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

263. “As you will soon see, finding freedom is only the first part. Living free is a whole other.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

264. “Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

265. “It’s like summer wear the world out, and by October everyone is just ready for a nap.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

266. “But I was a boy, seeing in him what boys can’t help but see in their fathers – a mold in which their own manhood might be cast.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

267. “There is a notion out there that black people enjoy the Sisyphean struggle against racism. In fact, most of us live for the day when we can struggle against anything else. But having been, by that very racism, pinned into ghettos, both metaphorical and real, our options for struggle are chosen long before we are born.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

268. “Breathing. I just dream of breathing.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

269. “Every Trump voter is certainly not a white supremacist, just as every white person in the Jim Crow South was not a white supremacist. But every Trump voter felt it was acceptable to hand the fate of the country over to one.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

270. “Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are – and I say this with big pride – the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

271. “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

272. “Whatever Obama’s other triumphs, arguably his greatest has been an expansion of the black imagination to encompass this: the idea that a man can be culturally black and many other things also – biracial, Ivy League, intellectual, cosmopolitan, temperamentally conservative, presidential.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

273. “In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. From that perspective, it seemed possible that the success of one man really could alter history, or even end it.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

274. “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

275. “The symbolic power of Barack Obama’s presidency – that whiteness was no longer strong enough to prevent peons from taking up residence in the castle – assaulted the most deeply rooted notions of white supremacy and instilled fear in its adherents and beneficiaries. And it was that fear that gave the symbols Donald Trump deployed – the symbols of racism – enough potency to make him president, and thus put him in position to injure the world.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

276. “Racism was banditry, pure and simple. And the banditry was not incidental to America, it was essential to it.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

277. “But satire wasn’t within my grasp then; satire is itself a privilege – one that evidences a knowledge of its target.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

278. “I am black, and have been plundered and have lost my body. But perhaps I too had the capacity for plunder, maybe I would take another human’s body to confirm myself in a community. Perhaps I already had. Hate gives identity.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

279. “To understand that the most costly war in this country’s history was launched in direct opposition to everything the country claims to be, to understand that this war was the product of centuries of enslavement, which is to see an even longer, more total war, is to alter the accepted conception of America as a beacon of freedom. How does one face this truth or forge a national identity out of it?”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

280. “We got plans, me and you. And this is not our end. This is not how you and me die.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

281. “When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

282. “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

283. “But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness. Our moment is too brief. Our bodies are too precious.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

284. “Bored whites were barbarian whites.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

285. “I don’t ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that t he larger story of America and the world does not end well. Our story is a tragedy.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

286. “An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

287. “I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

288. “Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America. More specifically, Barack Obama is the president of a congenitally racist country, erected upon the plunder of life, liberty, labor, and land. This plunder has not been exclusive to black people. – Ta.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

289. “Whatever appeals to the white working class is ennobled. What appeals to black workers, and all others outside the tribe, is dastardly identitarianism. All politics are identity politics – except the politics of white people, the politics of the blood heirloom.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

290. “Bored whites are brutal whites.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

291. “These were notes on how to write, and thus notes on how to think.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

292. “A separate society within America would depend on the mechanisms of American wealth creation, and wealth in America has never been created in absence of government policy, of banks willing to lend and a justice system willing to protect, and so this separatist nationalism revealed itself to be as flawed as integration, in that it, too, ultimately depended on the good graces of white people.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

293. “Among the Conscious, a man is only worth his latest reading.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

294. “The low whites, men such as our own Harlan, were tolerated publicly by the Quality, but spurned in private; their names were spat out at banquets, their children mocked in the parlors, their wives and daughters seduced and discarded. They were a degraded and downtrodden nation enduring the boot of the Quality, solely for the right to put a boot of their own to the Tasked.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

295. “It is insufficient to state the obvious of Donald Trump: that he is a white man who would not be president were it not for this fact.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

296. “From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from ‘restrictive covenants’ to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

297. “For now the country holds to the common theory that emancipation and civil rights were redemptive, a fraught and still-incomplete resolution of the accidental hypocrisy of a nation founded by slaveholders extolling a gospel of freedom... Conveniently, it holds the possibility of ultimate resolution, for if right-thinking individuals can dedicate themselves to finishing the work of ensuring freedom for all, then perhaps the ghosts of history can be escaped.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

298. “Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it’s just a few idiots. Isn’t. It’s the country.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

299. “I think of your grandmother calling me and noting how you were growing tall and would one day try to “test me.” And I said to her that I would regard that day, should it come, as the total failure of fatherhood because if all I had over you were my hands, then I really had nothing at all.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

300. “I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates