Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

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

An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future.

What sets black people apart is not some deficit in personal responsibility. It's the weight on our shoulders. That is what's actually different. We have the weight and burden of history.

The best part of writing is not the communication of knowledge to other people, but the acquisition and synthesizing of knowledge for oneself.

I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

When nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse.

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

[E]mpathy - not squishy self-serving conflict avoidance - is the hand-maiden, not the enemy, of reason and intellectual inquiry.

You can live in the world of myth and be taken seriously.

If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge.

The standard progressive approach of the moment is to mix color-conscious moral invective with color-blind public policy.

The essence of American racism is disrespect.

To prevent enabling oppression, we demand that black people be twice as good. To prevent verifying stereotypes, we pledge to never eat a slice a watermelon in front of white people.

The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully. Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.

Is the Jewish race thriftier than the Arab race?

That's not an accident that Donald Trump didn't begin with, say, trade or jobs or anything, that he actually began by otherizing the first African-American president of the United States.

The progressive approach to policy which directly addresses the effects of white supremacy is simple - talk about class and hope no one notices.

Addressing the moral failings of black people while ignoring the centuries-old failings of their governments amounts to a bait and switch.

Lot of folks like to mock dumb history, and pretend it's just a few idiots. Isn't. It's the country.

What it is is that Barack Obama was raised by a white mother and two white grandparents who, A, told him he was black and that there was nothing wrong with being black.

The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from hosts and myths.

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

Any time you have, you know, upwards of 90 percent of a demographic voting against somebody, that's a statement.

These were the days when I powerfully believed Breyers and Entenmann's to be pioneers in the field of antidepressants.

I think, as a writer, I'm in my own head.

My mom used to tell me, I can't use this phrase on the radio - but basically don't be one of those dudes hanging on the corner.

In particular in how [Barack Obama] has directed what you could describe as patronizing remarks to African-American communities.

I would flip this the other way and say over 90 percent of African-Americans voted against Donald Trump.

Racism is a physical experience.

There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.

You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere.

My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and that you still have to find some sort of mission.

Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.

Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.

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

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

Barack Obama’s 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.

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

Anyone can make a baby, but it takes a man to be a father.

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

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

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.

I thank my mother (Ma, you're only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it.

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

There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally.

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

America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values.

The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.

I did not tell you it would be okay because I never believed it would be okay.

Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner.