Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

303. “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

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

309. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— 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. “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

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

321. “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

322. “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

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

— 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. “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

326. “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

327. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

336. “Sloth was literal death for us, while for them it was the whole ambition of their lives.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

337. “She took another drink and set the ale at her feet, and looked up to the starry sky, and when her eyes moved away, I felt jealous of the heavens themselves.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

338. “Some of us are born into society and told that knowledge is rightfully beyond us, and ornamental ignorance should be our whole aspiration.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

339. “In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I’d realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

340. “We forget nothing, you and I,” Harriet said. “To forget is to truly slave. To forget is to die.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

341. “You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie. You cannot forget how much they took from us and how they transfigured our very bodies into sugar, tobacco, cotton, and gold.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

342. “I was terrified, not simply because I had lost my mother, but because I was a boy who remembered all his yesterdays in the crispest colors, and textures so rich I could drink them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

343. “Slavery was the root of all struggle. For it was said that the factories enslaved the hands of children, and that child-bearing enslaved the bodies of women, and that rum enslaved the souls of men. In.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

344. “There is so much in the eyes – the flash of rage, the warmth of joy, the pooling of sadness –.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

345. “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

346. “I nearly loved them. My work demanded no less: I must reach beyond all my particular hatred and pain, see them in their fullness, and then, with my pen, strike out and destroy them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

347. “And then he was gone. I would like to say that I mourned right then, or took some manner of note. But I did not.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

348. “And I dream of being able to turn to a woman for whom I got a feeling, and speak that feeling, holler that feeling, with no thought beyond me and her as to what that might mean.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

349. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates