Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “But the smell of Philadelphia offered no such balance; it hung everywhere, over every street, in the workshops and taverns, and, I would discover, if care was not taken it drifted into homes and bedchambers.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

355. “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

356. “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

357. “What I came to understand was the great democracy in this, and that what mattered to these boys was not so much what you came to the street with but how you carried what you were given.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

358. “For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

364. “Imagine the islands in a great river. And imagine that normal folks must swim from island to island – imagine that is their only method. But you, friend, you are different. 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.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

365. “In 1952, when West Germany began the process of making amends for the Holocaust, it did so under conditions that should be instructive to us. Resistance was violent. Very few Germans believed that Jews were entitled to anything. Only 5 percent of West Germans surveyed reported feeling guilty about the Holocaust, and only 29 percent believed that Jews were owed restitution from the German people.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

366. “I tasked hard. I was a man well regarded in slavery, which is to say, I was never regarded as a man at all.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

367. “And I too felt bound by my ignorance, by the questions that I had not yet understood to be more than just means, by my lack of understanding, and by Howard itself.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

368. “I stayed up late that night peering up at the rafters, thinking on Thena’s words. A beautiful woman, the kindest heart, did not gossip, kept to herself. I added this to the memories of her I’d collected from the people on the Street. Thena could not know how much I needed those small jigsaws of my mother, which together, over the years, I forged into a portrait of the woman who lived in dreams, like Big John, but only as smoke.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

369. “You cannot see yourself in him, lest your hand be stayed, and your hand must never be stayed, because the moment it is, the Tasked will see that you see them, and thus see yourself. In that moment of profound understanding, you are all done, because you cannot rule as is needed.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

370. “White supremacy is a crime and a lie, but it’s also a machine that generates meaning. This existential gift, as much as anything, is the source of its enormous, centuries-spanning power.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

371. “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

372. “I was certain my father saw things as I did, and I wondered how wrong it must have felt to see the best of you emerge in this way, in the place you didn’t expect, indeed in the place your whole world depends on it never appearing.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

373. “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

374. “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 Modred, who are the Dragon in Camelot’s clothes.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

375. “Own the mans especial knowledge and you shall own the measure of the man. Then you might fashion the costume, Hiram, and make it yours to fit.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

376. “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

377. “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. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “It has been said that the first black presidency was mostly “symbolic,” a dismissal that deeply underestimates the power of symbols. Symbols don’t just represent reality but can become tools to change it.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

382. “It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the method of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the Earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

383. “It only takes one person to make a change,” you are often told. This is also a myth. Perhaps one person can make a change, but not the kind of change that would raise your body to equality with your countrymen.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

384. “All must name a master to serve. All must choose.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

385. “Season of life, huh?” I said. “Naw, I prefer this season of loss, this season of dying, for I think it is the world at its most true.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

386. “They are both weaned on the religion of society, of slavery, which holds that for no particularly good reason one of them will live in the palace, while the other will be condemned to the dungeon.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

387. “I can now say that slavery murdered him, that slavery made a child of him, and now, dropped into a world where slavery held no sway, Maynard was dead the minute he touched water. I.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

388. “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 that moment I understood, from that whirlwind of ideas, that this secret war was waged against something more than the Taskmasters of Virginia, that we sought not merely to improve the world, but to remake it.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

389. “His world – the world of Virginia – was built on a foundation of lies. To collapse them all right then and there, at his age, might well have killed him.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

390. “I went down the line like this until I held a clutch of stories in my head, so many that no one else could remember who has said what and what the particular details were.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

391. “This moment became a source not just of pride but of quiet derision.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

392. “There is always a part of us that does not.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

393. “It was not only anger in me. I was nineteen, and a guarded nineteen who’d worked to feel nothing in this direction, so that when I did feel it, right there in that moment, when I did feel that I loved her, it was not with reason or ritual, nor the way that makes families and homes, but the way that wrecks them, I was undone.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

394. “It is quite a thing, a messy dirty thing, to put your own son, your own daughter, to the Task. Way I see it, ain’t no pure and it is we who are blessed, for we know this.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

395. “America was built on the preferential treatment of white people – 395 years of it.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

396. “And there is pain in that. Ain’t clean. It’s muck. I have told other men the same, even though I must now struggle to take my own medicine. I want you to know what I have seen, the men I have known since I have gone. The men who have had to decide what they love more, the everything, lovely and mean, right in front of them, or their own wrath and regard. And I choose the muck of this world, Sophia. I choose the everything.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

397. “They could have done anything to us out there, done anything to her, for this was the normal path of things. It was the necessary right of the Low, who held no property in man, to hold momentary property in those who ran, and to vent all their awful passions upon them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

398. “I nodded and listened. It was always like this. People talked to me. They told me their stories, gave them to me for keeping, which I did, always listening, always remembering.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

399. “Rise, I told myself. Rise.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

400. “It was clear to me that I had gone into the Goose one way and come out the other. I wondered how I had endured all those rides to Nathaniel’s seated next to her, wondered if I had somehow been blinded.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates