Top 150 Trevor Noah Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “My own family basically did what the American justice system does: I was given more lenient treatment than the black kids.”

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

54. “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

55. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “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

63. “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

64. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

66. “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

67. “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

68. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

70. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

72. “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

73. “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

74. “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

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Alex and Soweto have always had a huge rivalry. Soweto was seen as the snobbish township and Alexandra was seen as the gritty and dirty township.”

— Trevor Noah

79. “They were ready to do me violent harm, until they felt we were part of the same tribe, and then we were cool. 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 became a chameleon. My color didn’t change, but I could change your perception of my color. If.”

— Trevor Noah

80. “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

81. “Fufi was the love of my life. Beautiful but stupid.”

— Trevor Noah

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “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

87. “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

88. “That experience shaped what I’ve felt about relationships for the rest of my life: You do not own the thing that you love.”

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

90. “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

91. “Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom. People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive. That is what happened to me in Eden Park.”

— Trevor Noah

92. “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

93. “Catholic school is similar to apartheid in that it’s ruthlessly authoritarian, and its authority rests on a bunch of rules that don’t make any sense.”

— Trevor Noah

94. “That’s how a police state works – everyone thinks everyone else is the police.”

— Trevor Noah

95. “The whole issue of Santa Claus is a rather contentious one when it comes to African Christmas, a matter of pride. When an African dad buys his kid a present, the last thing he’s going to do is give some fat white man credit for it. African Dad will tell you straight up, “No, no, no. I bought you that.”

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

97. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

99. “It is so easy, from the outside, to put the blame on the woman and say, “You just need to leave.”

— Trevor Noah

100. “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