Top 150 Trevor Noah Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “The first time I saw the favelas in Rio I said, ‘Yeah, that’s Alexandra, but on a hill.”

— Trevor Noah

102. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

107. “The police were called about the noise. They came busting in wearing riot gear and pointing machine guns.”

— Trevor Noah

108. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

110. “He has no education. He has no skills. He doesn’t know what to do, where to be. The world has been taught to be scared of him, but the reality is that he is scared of the world.”

— Trevor Noah

111. “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

112. “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

113. “I went home, and my mom squealed when I walked in the door. “Ooooooh! They turned my baby boy into a pretty little girl! I’ve got a little girl! You’re so pretty!”

— Trevor Noah

114. “What I didn’t understand at the time was that the other kids genuinely had no clue what a white person was. Black kids in the township didn’t leave the township. Few people had televisions. They’d seen the white police roll through, but they’d never dealt with a white person face-to-face, ever. I.”

— Trevor Noah

115. “It didn’t matter that there was a war on our doorstep. She had things to do, places to be.”

— Trevor Noah

116. “The hood has a gravitational pull. It never leaves you behind, but it also never lets you leave. Because by making the choice to leave, you’re insulting the place that raised you and made you and never turned you away.”

— Trevor Noah

117. “And that’s the problem with the world. We have people who cannot police themselves, so they want to police everyone else around them.”

— Trevor Noah

118. “I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don’t really need a distinction between them.”

— Trevor Noah

119. “When it was time to pick my name, she chose Trevor, a name with no meaning whatsoever in South Africa, no precedent in my family It’s not even a Biblical name. “It’s just a name,” he explains. “My mother wanted her child beholden to no fate. She wanted me to be free to go anywhere, do anything, be anyone.”

— Trevor Noah

120. “The weird thing about these gangsters was that they were all, at a glance, identical. They drove the same red sports car. They dated the same beautiful eighteen-year-old girls. It was strange. It was like they didn’t have personalities; they shared a personality. One could be the other, and the other could be the one. They’d each studied how to be that gangster.”

— Trevor Noah

121. “Black people’s dogs don’t play fetch; you don’t throw anything to a black person’s dog unless it’s food. So.”

— Trevor Noah

122. “Once Fufi saw Panther she came right away. The dogs left with us and we walked. I sobbed the whole way home, still heartbroken. My mom had no time for my whining. “Why are you crying?!” “Because Fufi loves another boy.” “So? Why would that hurt you? It didn’t cost you anything. Fufi’s here. She still loves you. She’s still your dog. So get over it.”

— Trevor Noah

123. “You’re trying to teach him a lesson, and now that lesson is the rest of his life.”

— Trevor Noah

124. “There’s a meal you can get in the hood called a kota. It’s a quarter loaf of bread. You scrape out the bread, then you fill it with fried potatoes, a slice of baloney, and some pickled mango relish called achar. That costs a couple of rand. The more money you have, the more upgrades you can buy. If you have a bit more money you can throw in a hot dog. If.”

— Trevor Noah

125. “I fell in love with McDonald’s. McDonald’s, to me, tasted like America. McDonald’s is America. You see it advertised and it looks amazing. You crave it. You buy it. You take your first bite, and it blows your mind. It’s even better than you imagined. Then, halfway through, you realize it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. A few bites later, you’re like, Hmm, there’s a lot wrong with this. Then you’re done, you miss it like crazy, and you go back for more.”

— Trevor Noah

126. “I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they?”

— Trevor Noah

127. “And, finally, for bringing me into this world and making me the man I am today, I owe the greatest debt, a debt I can never repay, to my mother.”

— Trevor Noah

128. “There is also this to consider: The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine.”

— Trevor Noah

129. “You didn’t know your dog was deaf?” “No, we thought it was stupid.”

— Trevor Noah

130. “We were in a shop once, and the shopkeeper, right in front of us, turned to his security guard and said, in Afrikaans, “Volg daai swartes, netnou steel hulle iets.” “Follow those blacks in case they steal something.” My mother turned around and said, in beautiful, fluent Afrikaans, “Hoekom volg jy nie daai swartes sodat jy hulle kan help kry waarna hulle soek nie?” “Why don’t you follow these blacks so you can help them find what they’re looking for?”

— Trevor Noah

131. “I was forever trying to get the perfect 1970′s Michael Jackson Afro. What I had was more Buckwheat – unruly and impossible to comb, like stabbing a pitchfork into a bed of crab grass.”

— Trevor Noah

132. “Sometimes your dreams are limited by the information you have.”

— Trevor Noah

133. “My books were my prized possessions. I had a bookshelf where I put them, and I was so proud of it. I loved my books and kept them in pristine condition. I read them over and over, but I did not bend the pages or the spines. I treasured every single one.”

— Trevor Noah

134. “Racism exists. People are getting hurt, and just because it’s not happening to you doesn’t mean it’s not happening.”

— Trevor Noah

135. “And you must remember that black people worked for the government as well. As far as her white neighbors knew, my mom could have been a spy posing as a prostitute posing as a maid, sent into Hillbrow to inform on whites who were breaking the law. That’s how a police state works – everyone thinks everyone else is the police.”

— Trevor Noah

136. “I never let the memory of something painful prevent me from trying something new.”

— Trevor Noah

137. “Our toilet was in a corrugated-iron outhouse shared among the adjoining houses. Inside, there was a concrete slab with a hole in it and a plastic toilet seat on top; there had been a lid at some point, but it had broken and disappeared long ago. We couldn’t afford toilet paper, so on the wall next to the seat was a wire hanger with old newspaper on it for you to wipe. The newspaper was uncomfortable, but at least I stayed informed while I handled my business.”

— Trevor Noah

138. “There’s probably a goat hanging around – there’s always a goat.”

— Trevor Noah

139. “I always like to imagine being a South African policeman who likely couldn’t tell the difference between Chinese and Japanese but whose job was to make sure that people of the wrong color weren’t doing the wrong thing. If he saw an Asian person sitting on a whites-only bench, what would he say? “Hey, get off that bench, you Chinaman!” “Excuse me. I’m Japanese.” “Oh, I apologize, sir. I didn’t mean to be racist. Have a lovely afternoon.”

— Trevor Noah

140. “The reason for this was that the South African government wanted to establish good relations with the Japanese in order to import their fancy cars and electronics. So Japanese people were given honorary white status while Chinese people stayed black.”

— Trevor Noah

141. “There was an undercurrent of terror that ran through the house, but the actual beatings themselves were not that frequent. I think if they had been, the situation would have ended sooner. Ironically, the good times in between were what allowed it to drag out and escalate as far as it did.”

— Trevor Noah

142. “For many black South Africans, the story of the war was that there was someone called Hitler and he was the reason the Allies were losing the war. This Hitler was so powerful that at some point black people had to go help white people fight against him – and if the white man has to stoop to ask the black man for help fighting someone, that someone must be the toughest guy of all time.”

— Trevor Noah

143. “Part of the effort to divide black people was to make sure we were separated not just physically but by language as well. In the Bantu schools, children were only taught in their home language. Zulu kids learned in Zulu. Tswana kids learned in Tswana. Because of this, we’d fall into the trap the government had set for us and fight among ourselves, believing that we were different. The.”

— Trevor Noah

144. “When you love someone you create a new world for them.”

— Trevor Noah

145. “Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them.”

— Trevor Noah

146. “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

147. “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

148. “And when someone gets killed by lightning, everyone knows it’s because somebody used Mother Nature to take out a hit.”

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

150. “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