Quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

“I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this ...”

“I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded science projects, encyclopedias, and road atlases. I left much of that wonder somewhere between Mrs.W...”

“Nothing between us was ever planned--not even you. We were both 24 years old when you were born, the normal age for most Americans, but among the class we soon found ourselves, we ranked as teenage...”

“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, b...”

“The fear had precedent. Toward the end of the Civil War, having witnessed the effectiveness of the Union's 'colored troops,' a flailing Confederacy began considering an attempt to recruit blacks in...”

“To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism la carte.”

“Think of all the love poured into him. Think of the tuitions for Montessori and music lessons. Think of the gasoline expended, the treads worn carting him to football games, basketball tournaments,...”

“The earthquake cannot be subpoenaed. The typhoon will not bend under indictment. They sent the killer of Prince Jones back to his work, because he was not a killer at all. He was a force of nature,...”

“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 we...”

“The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. "White America" is a syndicate arrayed t...”

“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 dullardusually believing himself...”

“The election of Donald Trump confirmed everything I knew of my country and none of what I could accept. The idea that America would follow its first black president with Donald Trump accorded with ...”

“There are no clean victories for black people, nor, perhaps, for any people. The presidency of Barack Obama is no different. One can now say that an African American individual can rise to the same...”

“One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern gate of the White House. A mostly white crowd had assembled. As the motorcade drove by, people c...”

“Barack Obamas victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing mere about symbols.”

“You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets.”

“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 p...”

“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 ri...”

“The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so precious.”