Top 400 Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 9

351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “My favorite season. World is so beautiful this time of year. There’s a kinda peace that just falls on everything, even up here. It’s like summer wear the world out, and by October everyone is just ready for a nap.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

355. “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

356. “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

357. “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

358. “Tell my brothers to be watchful unto prayer and when the good old ship of Zion come along, be ready to step onboard.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

363. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

365. “That’s the whole game, you know? Eat up the land, then keep going. Someday they gonna run out of land, and I don’t know what they’ll do then.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

370. “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

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

377. “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

378. “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. Corrine was no different, and it was why, relentless as she was against slavery, she could so casually condemn me to the hole, condemn Georgie Parks to death, and mock an outrage put upon Sophia.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

380. “The weakness in the case for integration was that it ultimately rested on a critical mass of white people playing along, either out of their own particular interests or some sense of morality. History has produced few instances for the former and virtually none of the latter. This made sense. If there is a power that has ever surrendered itself purely out of some altruistic sense of justice, I have yet to come across it.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

381. “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

382. “And watching this silently, as was my way, I marveled at the bonds between us – the way we shortened our words... the shared memories... , of heroes who did not live in books, but in our talk; an entire world of our own, hidden away from them...”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

383. “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

384. “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

385. “But what did it mean to find me, a slave, dreaming about those books?”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

386. “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

387. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

389. “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

390. “But you did come back,” she said. “And you look good for yourself. It has been a blessing of mine to see you return to us, to be reborn, twice in a lifetime – up out of the Goose, and now out of the jaws of Ryland. Must be some powerful meaning, for we are not in Natchez, but right here before each other. Some meaning in us, I think. Some powerful, powerful meaning.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

391. “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

392. “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

393. “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

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

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

395. “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

396. “Rise, I told myself. Rise.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

397. “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

398. “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

399. “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

400. “The low whites enjoyed only a toehold in the craggy face of society, an insecure position, which only augmented the brutal spirit they so often visited upon the coloreds of Virginia. This brutality was the offering Quality made to the low whites, the payment that united them.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates