Top 150 Trevor Noah Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Trevor Noah

2. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

4. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

7. “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

8. “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

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

14. “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

15. “That was my mom. Don’t fight the system. Mock the system.”

— Trevor Noah

16. “In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects.”

— Trevor Noah

17. “The hood made me realise that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programmes and part-time jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate.”

— Trevor Noah

18. “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

19. “The fact that I grew up in a world run by women was no accident. Apartheid kept me away from my father because he was white, but for almost all the kids I knew on my grandmother’s block in Soweto, apartheid had taken away their fathers as well, just for different reasons.”

— Trevor Noah

20. “My mom would always say, “My job is to feed your body, feed your spirit, and feed your mind.”

— Trevor Noah

21. “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

22. “My mom never gave me an inch. Anytime I got in trouble it was tough love, lectures, punishment, and hidings. Every time. For every infraction. You get that with a lot of black parents. They’re trying to discipline you before the system does.”

— Trevor Noah

23. “Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.”

— Trevor Noah

24. “Learn from your past and be better 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 onto it, Don’t be bitter.”

— Trevor Noah

25. “The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

28. “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

29. “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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “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

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

42. “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

43. “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

44. “My mother calls it ‘the black tax.’ Because the generations who came before you have been pillaged, rather than being free to use your skills and education to move forward, you lose everything just trying to bring everyone behind you back up from zero.”

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

46. “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

47. “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

48. “Because racism exists, and you have to pick a side. You can say that you don’t pick sides, but eventually life will force you to pick a side.”

— Trevor Noah

49. “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

50. “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