Top 150 Trevor Noah Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “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

52. “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

53. “In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don’t see the person it affects. We don’t see their face. We don’t see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people ever saw black people as human, they would see that slavery is unconscionable.”

— Trevor Noah

54. “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

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids.”

— Trevor Noah

61. “I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them.”

— Trevor Noah

62. “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

63. “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

64. “That’s who I was. Always an outsider. As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or.”

— Trevor Noah

65. “Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to.”

— Trevor Noah

66. “My mom thought having a child was going to be like having a partner, but every child is born the center of its own universe, incapable of understanding the world beyond its own wants and needs, and I was no different.”

— Trevor Noah

67. “If you’re Native American and you pray to the wolves, you’re a savage. If you’re African and you pray to your ancestors, you’re a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, well, that’s just common sense.”

— Trevor Noah

68. “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.” 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 to zero.”

— Trevor Noah

69. “I wasn’t popular, but I wasn’t an outcast. I was everywhere with everybody, and at the same time I was all by myself.”

— Trevor Noah

70. “Yes, but the pressure of the university is going to get you. I know you. You won’t sit by and watch these guys become better than you. If you’re in an environment that is positive and progressive, you too will become that. I keep telling you to change your life, and you don’t. One day you’re going to get arrested, and when you do, don’t call me. I’ll tell the police to lock you up just to teach you a.”

— Trevor Noah

71. “I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t know any kids besides my cousins. I wasn’t a lonely kid – I was good at being alone. I’d read books, play with the toy that I had, make up imaginary worlds. I lived inside my head. I still live inside my head. To this day you can leave me alone for hours and I’m perfectly happy entertaining myself. I have to remember to be with people.”

— Trevor Noah

72. “In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent.”

— Trevor Noah

73. “But the real world doesn’t go away. 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. You can say, oh I don’t take sides, but at some point, life will force you to pick a side.”

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

75. “But aren’t you afraid?” I’d say. “There’s only one of you and there’s so many of them.” “Honey, I’m not alone,” she’d say. “I’ve got all of Heaven’s angels behind me.” “Well, it would be nice if we could see them,” I’d say. “Because I don’t think the rioters know they’re there.” She’d tell me not to worry. She always came back to the phrase she lived by: “If God is with me, who can be against me?” She was never scared. Even when she should have been.”

— Trevor Noah

76. “In Soweto you were always hearing about men getting doused with pots of boiling water – often a woman’s only recourse. And men were lucky if it was water. Some women used cooking oil. Water was if the woman wanted to teach her man a lesson. Oil meant she wanted to end it.”

— Trevor Noah

77. “The only authority my mother recognized was God’s. God is love and the Bible is truth – everything else was up for debate. 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

78. “Love is a creative act. When you love someone, you create a world for them.”

— Trevor Noah

79. “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.”

— Trevor Noah

80. “People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.”

— Trevor Noah

81. “You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad. Where you either hate them or love them. But that’s not how people are.”

— Trevor Noah

82. “What I do remember, what I will never forget, is the violence that followed. The triumph of democracy over apartheid is sometimes called the Bloodless Revolution. It is called that because very little white blood was spilled. Black blood ran in the streets. As.”

— Trevor Noah

83. “The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”

— Trevor Noah

84. “That, and so many other smaller incidents in my life, made me realize that language, even more than color, defines who you are to people. I.”

— Trevor Noah

85. “Your son has burned down my life!” But there was no punishment for me that day. My mom was too much in shock. There’s naughty, and then there’s burning down a white person’s house. She didn’t know what to do.”

— Trevor Noah

86. “The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all.”

— Trevor Noah

87. “We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off.”

— Trevor Noah

88. “If you stop to consider the ramifications, you’ll never do anything.”

— Trevor Noah

89. “Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

— Trevor Noah

90. “You cannot blame anyone else for What you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices.”

— Trevor Noah

91. “We live in a world where we don’t see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don’t live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another’s pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.”

— Trevor Noah

92. “Comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.”

— Trevor Noah

93. “I know that he never married. He used to say that most people marry because they want to control another person, and he never wanted to be controlled.”

— Trevor Noah

94. “The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world because he has none of the tools necessary to cope with it.”

— Trevor Noah

95. “The genius of apartheid was convincing people who were the overwhelming majority to turn on each other. Apart hate, is what it was. You separate people into groups and make.”

— Trevor Noah

96. “The smallest thing could prompt her. I’d walk through the house on the way to my room and say, “Hey, Mom” without glancing up. She’d say, “No, Trevor! You look at me. You acknowledge me. Show me that I exist to you, because the way you treat me is the way you will treat your woman. Women like to be noticed. Come and acknowledge me and let me know that you see me. Don’t just see me when you need something.”

— Trevor Noah

97. “In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren’t taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it’s taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: “There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it’s done.” It was the same for us. “Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let’s move on.”

— Trevor Noah

98. “The first time I saw the favelas in Rio I said, ‘Yeah, that’s Alexandra, but on a hill.”

— Trevor Noah

99. “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. It must be my fault this is happening is the only conclusion you can draw, because why are you the only one receiving his wrath?”

— Trevor Noah

100. “All nonwhites were systematically classified into various groups and subgroups. Then these groups were given differing levels of rights and privileges in order to keep them at odds.”

— Trevor Noah