Top 150 Trevor Noah Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

110. “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

111. “Because I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she said. “A black child, I understand. A black child, you hit them and they stay black. Trevor, when you hit him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. I’ve never seen those colors before. I’m scared I’m going to break him.”

— Trevor Noah

112. “I would beat you, but Jesus has already exposed your lies.”

— Trevor Noah

113. “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

114. “Relationships are built in the silences.”

— Trevor Noah

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

118. “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

119. “In my mind, I wasn’t breaking the rules, because the rules didn’t make any sense.”

— Trevor Noah

120. “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.”

— Trevor Noah

121. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

126. “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

127. “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

128. “None of them had cars, either. There was no future in which most of these families would ever have cars. There was maybe one car for every thousand people, yet almost everyone had a driveway. It was almost like building the driveway was a way of willing the car to happen. The story of Soweto is the story of the driveways. It’s a hopeful place. –.”

— Trevor Noah

129. “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

130. “The unemployment rate, technically speaking, was “lower” in South Africa during apartheid, which makes sense. There was slavery – that’s how everyone was employed. When democracy came, everyone had to be paid a minimum wage.”

— Trevor Noah

131. “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

132. “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

133. “My mom, who was only six or seven herself, used to round up the abandoned kids and form a troop and take them around to the shebeens. They’d collect empties from the men who were passed out and take the bottles to where you could turn them in for a deposit. Then my mom would take that money, buy food in the spaza shops, and feed the kids. She was a child taking care of children. When.”

— Trevor Noah

134. “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

135. “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

136. “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

137. “But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked.”

— Trevor Noah

138. “Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks.”

— Trevor Noah

139. “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

140. “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.”

— Trevor Noah

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

— Trevor Noah

142. “Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered.”

— Trevor Noah

143. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

145. “By making the choice to leave, you’re insulting the place that raised you, and made you, and never turned you away. And that place fights you back.”

— Trevor Noah

146. “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

147. “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

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

— Trevor Noah

149. “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

150. “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