Top 150 Trevor Noah Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least a perception of it.”

— Trevor Noah

2. “Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”

— Trevor Noah

3. “We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.”

— Trevor Noah

4. “Sun’qhela is a phrase with many shades of meaning. It says “don’t undermine me,” “don’t underestimate me,” and “just try me.” It’s a command and a threat, all at once. It.”

— Trevor Noah

5. “You must be careful who you surround yourself with because where you are can determine who you are.”

— Trevor Noah

6. “As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up. You don’t ask to be accepted for everything you are, just the one part of yourself that you’re willing to share.”

— Trevor Noah

7. “Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says “We’re the same.” A language barrier says “We’re different.”

— Trevor Noah

8. “Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her.”

— Trevor Noah

9. “As I grew older I started buying my own books. I loved fantasy, loved to get lost in worlds that didn’t exist.”

— Trevor Noah

10. “The Zulu went to war with the white man. The Xhosa played chess with the white man. For a long time neither was particularly successful, and each blamed the other for a problem neither had created.”

— Trevor Noah

11. “When you strike a woman, you strike a rock.”

— Trevor Noah

12. “He’s like an exotic bird collector... he only wants a woman who is free because his dream is to put her in a cage.”

— Trevor Noah

13. “It is one thing to be born in the hood and know that you will never leave the hood. But the cheese boy has been shown the world outside. His family has done okay. They have a house. They’ve sent him to a decent school; maybe he’s even matriculated. He has been given more potential, but he has not been given more opportunity. He has been given an awareness of the world that is out there, but he has not been given the means to reach it.”

— Trevor Noah

14. “As modestly as we lived at home, I never felt poor because our lives were so rich with experience. We were always out doing something, going somewhere.”

— Trevor Noah

15. “He chose to have me in his life... Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”

— Trevor Noah

16. “Trevor, remember a man is not determined by how much he earns. You can still be a man of the house and earn less than your woman. Being a man is not what you have, it’s who you are. Being more of a man doesn’t mean your woman has to be less than you.”

— Trevor Noah

17. “People say all the time that they’d do anything for the people they love. But would you really? Would you do anything? Would you give everything? I don’t know that a child knows that kind of selfless love. A mother, yes. A mother will clutch her children and jump from a moving car to keep them from harm. She will do it without thinking. But I don’t think the child knows how to do that, not instinctively. It’s something the child has to learn.”

— Trevor Noah

18. “I believed that Fufi was my dog, but of course that wasn’t true. Fufi was a dog. I was a boy. We got along well. She happened to live in my house. That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love. I was lucky to learn that lesson at such a young age. I have so many friends who still, as adults, wrestle with feelings of betrayal.”

— Trevor Noah

19. “Don’t fight the system, mock the system.”

— Trevor Noah

20. “Imagine being thrown out of an airplane. You hit the ground and break all your bones, you go to the hospital and you heal and you move on and finally put the whole thing behind you – and then one day somebody tells you about parachutes. That’s how I felt.”

— Trevor Noah

21. “Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.”

— Trevor Noah

22. “We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited. Growing up in Soweto, our dream was to put another room on our house. Maybe have a driveway. Maybe, someday, a cast-iron gate at the end of the driveway. Because that is all we knew. But the highest rung of what’s possible is far beyond the world you can see.”

— Trevor Noah

23. “My mom raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back I realize she raised me like a white kid – not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered. We.”

— Trevor Noah

24. “I’d found my niche. Since I belonged to no group I learned to move seamlessly between groups. I floated. I was a chameleon, still, a cultural chameleon.”

— Trevor Noah

25. “Temperance lived with his second family in the Meadowlands, and we visited them sparingly because my mom was always afraid of being poisoned. Which was a thing that would happen. The first family were the heirs, so there was always the chance they might get poisoned by the second family. It was like Game of Thrones with poor people. We’d go into that house and my mom would warn me.”

— Trevor Noah

26. “My mother used to tell me, “I chose to have you because I wanted something to love and something that would love me unconditionally in return.” I was a product of her search for belonging.”

— Trevor Noah

27. “My mother’s greatest fear was that I would end up paying the black tax, that I would get trapped by the cycle of poverty and violence that came before me. She had always promised me that I would be the one to break that cycle.”

— Trevor Noah

28. “I could champion racial justice in our home, or I could enjoy granny’s cookies. I went with the cookies. –.”

— Trevor Noah

29. “Nearly one million people lived in Soweto. Ninety-nine point nine percent of them were black – and then there was me. I was famous in my neighborhood just because of the color of my skin. I was so unique people would give directions using me as a landmark. “The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you’ll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there.” Whenever.”

— Trevor Noah

30. “I became a chameleon. My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. I didn’t look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you.”

— Trevor Noah

31. “We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. “What if... ” “If only... ” “I wonder what would have... ” You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.”

— Trevor Noah

32. “So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it “the black tax.”

— Trevor Noah

33. “I soon learned that the quickest way to bridge the race gap was through language.”

— Trevor Noah

34. “Trevor, make sure your woman is the woman in your life. Don’t be one of those men who makes his wife compete with his mother. A man with a wife cannot be beholden to his mother.”

— Trevor Noah

35. “As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate.”

— Trevor Noah

36. “Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked.”

— Trevor Noah

37. “Working with Andrew was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, “Okay, here’s what you need, and here’s how it works.” Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer.”

— Trevor Noah

38. “They’ve sent him to a decent school; maybe he’s even matriculated. He has been given more potential, but he has not been given more opportunity.”

— Trevor Noah

39. “Everything I have ever done I’ve done from a place of love. If I don’t punish you, the world will punish you even worse. The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you.”

— Trevor Noah

40. “He liked to be liked by the world, which made his abuse even harder to deal with. Because if you think someone is a monster and the whole world says he’s a saint, you begin to think that you’re the bad person.”

— Trevor Noah

41. “I pointed at my mother. “She’s my mother.” “What? She can’t be your mother, boy. She’s black. Can’t you see?” My mom shook her head. “Poor little colored boy lost his mother. What a shame.” I panicked. Was I crazy? Is she not my mother? I started bawling. “You’re my mother. You’re my mother. She’s my mother. She’s my mother.” She shrugged again. “So sad. I hope he finds his mother.”

— Trevor Noah

42. “I remember the thing that caused the trauma, but I don’t hold on to the trauma. I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new. If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mom gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules.”

— Trevor Noah

43. “That’s what apartheid did: It convinced every group that it was because of the other race that they didn’t get into the club. It’s basically the bouncer at the door telling you, “We can’t let you in because of your friend Darren and his ugly shoes.” So you look at Darren and say, “Screw you, Black Darren. You’re holding me back.” Then when Darren goes up, the bouncer says, “No, it’s actually your.”

— Trevor Noah

44. “Learn from your past and be better because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.” And she never was. The deprivations of her youth, the betrayals of her parents, she never complained about any of it.”

— Trevor Noah

45. “We weren’t taught to think critically about Hitler and anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. We weren’t taught, for instance, that the architects of apartheid were big fans of Hitler, that the racist policies they put in place were inspired, in part, by the racist policies of the Third Reich. We weren’t taught how to think about how Hitler related to the world we lived in. We weren’t being taught to think, period.”

— Trevor Noah

46. “When you strike a woman, you strike a rock.” As a nation, we recognized the power of women, but in the home they were expected to submit and obey. In.”

— Trevor Noah

47. “The world doesn’t love you. If the police get you, the police don’t love you. When I beat you, I’m trying to save you. When they beat you, they’re trying to kill you.”

— Trevor Noah

48. “She taught me to challenge authority and question the system. The only way it backfired on her was that I constantly challenged and questioned her. –.”

— Trevor Noah

49. “Racism exists. People are getting hurt, and just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening. And at some point, you have to choose. Black or white. Pick a side. You can try to hide from it.”

— Trevor Noah

50. “It’s easy to be judgmental about crime when you live in a world wealthy enough to be removed from it.”

— Trevor Noah