Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

You can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position, he said. The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then start...

We are warriors. And yet a moment ago, you were women. Mother, I swear it, I am doing all I can. And I am sorry, daughter, but you are going to have to do more.

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...

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...

To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assupmtion of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next.

For that more ennobling narrative, as for much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.

A separate society within America would depend on the mechanisms of American wealth creation, and wealth in America has never been created in absence of government policy, of banks willing to lend and...

I came to see the streets and the schools as 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...

Love of country, like all other forms of love, requires that you tell those you care about not simply what they want to hear but what they need to hear.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else's chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that withi...

These efforts curtailed the ability of black people to buy better housing, to move to better neighborhoods, and to build wealth. Also, by confining black people to the same neighborhoods, these effort...

For realists, the true story of the Civil War illuminates the problem of ostensibly sober-minded compromise with powerful, and intractable, evil.

I come back to the motherland and this is the thanks I get? Still better than the knife-wielding thugs I found in Harlem, Misty. You do remember, don't you? I resent the term thug. That's 'cause you a...

The Dreamers are quoting Martin Luther King and exulting nonviolence for the weak and the biggest guns for the strong.

When it becomes clear that Good Negro Government might, in some way, empower actual Negroes over actual whites, then the fear sets in, the affirmative-action charges begin, and birtherism emerges. And...

He laughed, then continued, The reason I say that is because those are the times where sometimes you feel actually a little bit hurt. Because you feel like saying to these folks, ‘[Don’t] you think if...

But the Levittowns were, with Levitt's willing acquiescence, segregated throughout their early years. Daisy and Bill Myers, the first black family to move into Levittown, Pennsylvania, were greeted wi...

But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know.

Educated children walked in single file on the right side of the hallway, raised their hands to use the lavatory, and carried the lavatory pass when en route. Educated children never offered excuses—c...

Five years later, 750,000 Americans were dead. But the fact that such carnage had been wreaked for a cause that Ulysses S. Grant called one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for whi...