Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I grew up in a house drawn between love and fear. There was no room for softness. But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else—that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or ha...

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life in struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be y...

I am ashamed of how I acted that day, ashamed of endangering your body. But I am not ashamed because I am a bad father, a bad individual or ill mannered. I am ashamed that I made an error, knowing tha...

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, w...

I know the danger. I know we may not come back, and in so doing, doom a nation. I would give my life for my nation. But I will not give the life of my sister. I will not, yet again, be parted from my...

I do not long for those days. I have no desire to make you tough or street, perhaps because any toughness I garnered came reluctantly. I think I was always, somehow, aware of the price. I think I some...

I don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that t he larger story of America and the world does not end wel...

He has lost best friend to treachery, a wife to allegiances... an uncle to betrayal, still more friends to sorcery... He kept up the regal mask. But he could not always do it. No one can. I remember m...

I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber, Frederick Douglass told his audiences. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master, and ran off with them.

Faggot was a word I had employed all my life. And now here they were, The Cabal, The Coven, The Others, The Monsters, The Outsiders, The Faggots, The Dykes, dressed in all their human clothes. I am bl...

Do not speak to me of martyrdom, of men who die to be remembered on some parish day. I don’t believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like castanets will echo me. SONIA SANCHEZ

Hate gives identity.

I don’t ever want to forget that resistance must be its own reward, since resistance, at least within the life span of the resistors, almost always fails.

The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

It is not a mistake that Gone with the Wind is one of the most read works of American literature or that The Birth of a Nation is the most revered touchstone of all American film. Both emerge from a n...

She also taught me to write, by which I mean not simply organizing a set of sentences into a series of paragraphs, but organizing them as a means of investigation. When I was in trouble at school (whi...

On the last day of her visit I drove your grandmother to the airport. Your mother was her only child, as you are my only child, and having watched you grow I know that nothing could possibly be more p...

Indeed, if you’re looking for a bridge, if you’re looking for someone to connect the heart of black America with the heart of all of America, to allow us all to look at the American dream in the same...

The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick.

When it came to her son, Dr. Jones’s country did what it does best—it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that...