Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of a greatness that never was, is tragedy.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

302. “Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

303. “Over the next twelve years, I came to regard Obama as a skilled politician, a deeply moral human being, and one of the greatest presidents in American history. He was phenomenal – the most agile interpreter and navigator of the color line I had ever seen. He had an ability to emote a deep and sincere connection to the hearts of black people, while never doubting the hearts of white people.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

304. “To Trump whiteness is neither notional nor symbolic but is the very core of his power. In this, Trump is not singular. But whereas his forebears carried whiteness like an ancestral talisman, Trump cracked the glowing amulet open, releasing its eldritch energies.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

305. “When you have a policy of making sure that African Americans cannot build wealth, of plundering African American communities of wealth, giving opportunities to other people, it’s only right that you might want to, you know, pay that back.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

306. “Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello – which is to say, the view taken in struggle.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

307. “And watching this silently, as was my way, I marveled at the bonds between us-the way we shortened our words, or spoke, sometimes, with no words at all... an entire world of our own, hidden away from them, and to be part of that world, I felt even then, was to be in on a secret, a secret that was in you.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

308. “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. This common theory dominates much of American discourse, from left to right.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

309. “Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

310. “It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man – no matter how fallen – can be president.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

311. “And as I mounted each step, I felt the terrible logic of the Task, my Task, snap into place.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

312. “Liberals today mostly view racism not as an active, distinct evil but as a relative of white poverty and inequality. They ignore the long tradition of this country actively punishing black success – and the elevation of that punishment, in the mid-twentieth century, to federal policy.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

313. “America’s indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

314. “The girl from Chicago understood this too, and she understood something more – that all are not equally robbed of their bodies, that the bodies of women are set out for pillage in ways I could never truly know.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

315. “That I really was the wretch they made me out to be, and deserved no more than the abuses I received.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

316. “My part has been to tell the story of the slave. The story of the master never wanted for narrators. FREDERICK DOUGLASS.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

317. “I think, as a writer, I’m in my own head.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

318. “I felt a great rage, not simply because I knew they had been taken but because I knew how they had been taken, how they had been parted from eacch other, how I was born and made by this great parting. Better than before, I understood the whole dimensions of this crime, the entirety of the theft, the small moments, the tenderness, the quarrels and corrections, all stolen, so that men such as my father might live as gods.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

319. “This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual details.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

320. “Perhaps the Irish too had once lost their bodies. Perhaps being named “black” had nothing to do with any of this; perhaps being named “black” was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

321. “Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

322. “Because you, unlike the others, can see a bridge across that river, many bridges even, connecting all the islands, many bridges, each one made of a different story. And you cannot just see the bridges, you can walk across, drive across, conduct across, with passengers in tow, sure as an engineer conduct a train. That is Conduction. The many bridges. The many stories. The way over the river.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

323. “For a man that can’t honor his wife’s dying wish ain’t even a man, ain’t even a life.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

324. “I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

325. “Time lost all meaning. Minutes could not be discerned from hours, and with neither sun nor moon, day and night became fictions.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

326. “I am convinced that the most degraded field-hand, on the most miserable plot in Mississippi, knew more of the world than any overstuffed, forth-holding American philosophe.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

327. “Walking down the back stairs, I knew that my father’s statement could only be reconciled through the peculiar religion of Virginia – Virginia, where it was held that a whole race would submit to chains; Virginia, where this same race held the math that molded iron and carved marble to exact proportion and were still called beasts; Virginia, where a man would profess his love for you one moment and sell you off the next.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

328. “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

329. “It was mine by blood. I was correct, but not in the sense I thought.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

330. “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. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

331. “I do not claim to have loved Sophia then, though I thought I did. I was young and love to me was a fuse that was lit, not a garden that was grown.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

332. “The gazelle does not match claws with the lion – he runs. But we did more than run. We.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

333. “We feared them and hated them, perhaps more than we feared and hated the Quality who held us, for all of us were low, we were all Tasked, and we should be in union and arrayed against the Quality, if only the low whites would wager their crumbs for a slice of the whole cake.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

334. “There is no them without you, and without their right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

335. “We have accepted the gospel that says our freedom is a call to war against unfreedom.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

336. “Almost any tasking man at Lockless would have traded his life for mine. But there was a weight of being so close to them, the weight that Thena had tried to warn me about, but something more, the crushing weight of seeing how the Quality truly lived, in all their luxury, and how much they really took from us.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

337. “They knew our names and they knew our parents. But they did not know us, because not knowing was essential to their power.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

338. “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.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

339. “When it came to her son, Dr. Jones’s country did what it does best – it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

340. “Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

341. “Oh, to be back there, and be young again.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

342. “Why – for us and only us – is the other side of free will and free spirits an assault on our bodies?”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

343. “It struck me that even here, in the free North, the luxuries of this world were built right on top of us.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

344. “And there I was, awakening with a start to nothing but ephemera, shadows, and screams.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

345. “We are all divided against ourselves. Sometimes part of us begins to speak for reasons we don’t even understand until years later.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

346. “And it occurred to me how absurd it was to cling to morality when surrounded by people who had none.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

347. “The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

348. “It all made sense to me, but would have made more had I considered that Sophia was a woman of her own mind, with intentions, calculations, and considerations all her own.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

349. “I saw that just as the fields and its workers were the engine of everything, the house itself would have been lost without those who tasked within it.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

350. “I heard this the way an old man hears a young unrequited love attest to their true feelings from that bygone era – the mix of trivia and nostalgia, an ancient wound reawakened by the rain, the ghost of a feeling, once deeply held, but now only a stray memory from what seemed another lifetime.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates