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TaNehisi Coates Quotes | Quotes said by TaNehisi Coates

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #1

    ... in a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.


  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #2

    ...to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #3

    Americans deify democracy in a way that allows for a dim awareness that they have, from time to time, stood in defiance of their God. But democracy is a forgiving God and America's heresies—torture, theft, enslavement—are so common among individuals and nations that none can declare themselves immune.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #4

    By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew—and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can’t promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #5

    Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin's black robes one moment, and Dorsett's spin move the next. This was what my father deeded--that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand the brain death that sprawled from the projects to the subdivisions. Consciousness was a beginning, but the imagination could turn straight 18s into paladins in plate, could make warrens in tunnels from graph paper, could pull armies of gnolls from miniatures--that was the Knowledge that ultimately would find a way out.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #6

    Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #7

    From the day we touched these stolen shores, he'd explain to anyone who'd listen, they infected our minds. They deployed their phrenologists, their backward Darwinists, and forged a false Knowledge to keep us down. But against this demonology, there were those who battled back. Universities scorned them. Compromised professors scoffed at their names. So they published themselves and hawked their Knowledge at street fairs, churches, and bazaars.
    For their efforts, they were forgotten. Their great works languished out of print, while those they sought to save grew fat on integration and amnesia.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #8

    Fuck what you have heard or what you have seen in your son. He may lie about homework and laugh when the teacher calls home. He may curse his teacher, propose arson for the whole public system. But inside is the same sense that was in me. None of us ever want to fail. None of us want to be unworthy, to not measure up.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #9

    I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #10

    I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers this planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #11

    I found that the same softness which once made me a target now compelled people to trust me with their stories.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #12

    I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself... I was was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger — I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #13

    I have not spent my time studying the problem of race—race itself is just a restatement and retrenchment of the problem. You see this from time to time when some dullard—usually believing himself white—proposes that the way forward is a grand orgy of black and white, ending only when we are all beige and thus the same race. But a great number of black people already are beige. And the history of civilization is littered with dead races (Frankish, Italian, German, Irish) later abandoned because they no longer serve their purpose—the organization of people beneath, and beyond, the umbrella of rights.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #14

    I should not mistake her calm probing for the absence of anger.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #15

    I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made fore the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #16

    I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #17

    I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #18

    In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #19

    It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #20

    It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #21

    My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #22

    My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #23

    My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #24

    Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #25

    On our life map, he drew a bright circle around twelve through eighteen. This was the abyss where, unguided, black boys were swallowed whole, only to reemerge on corners and prison tiers.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #26

    Our art is cynical and bad-ass and made by people who will not be happy until you join them in the church of everything is fucked up, so throw up your hands. This is art as anesthesia.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #27

    Our art is made in cities like New York by people who are running from other places. They feel themselves as misfits who were trapped in dead-end suburbs. They hated high school. Their parents did not understand. They are seeking a better world. And when they realize that the world is wholly a problem, that the whole problem is in them, they make television for other people who are also running, who take voyage in search of a perfect world, then rage at the price of the ticket.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #28

    Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others...

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #29

    Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another.

  • TaNehisi Coates Quote #30

    She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers.

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