Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I had not been prepared for the simple charm of watching someone you love grow.

I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them.

I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.

I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than...

I spent years developing a career, acquiring assets, engaging responsibilities. And one racist act. It’s all it takes.

I tell you this because you must understand, no matter the point of our talk, that I didn't always have things, but I had people -- I always had people. I had a mother and father who I would match aga...

I was a curious boy, but the schools were not concerned with curiosity. They were concerned with compliance. I loved a few of my teachers. But I cannot say that I truly believed any of them. Some year...

I was of the age when it was natural to seek out a wife, but by then I had seen tasking women promised to tasking men, and then seen how such promises were kept. I remember how these young couples wou...

I was only beginning 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.

I wish he'd told me not just of the power of kings, but of the might of the people. I wish he'd warned me that they, too, have secrets. They, too, have mysteries. They, too, possess a power of their o...

I wish, when I was back in that French class, that I had connected the conjugations, verbs, and gendered nouns to something grander. I wish someone had told me what that class really was—a gate to som...

I wonder if this is it. If I have finally flown too far from home. I think of Ramonda and Ororo. Zuri and W'Kabi. Father and S'yan. But above all, I think of you. and I think of dying out here, of dri...

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

If I could have chosen a flag back then, it would have been embroidered with a portrait of Malcolm X, dressed in a business suit, his tie dangling, one hand parting a window shade, the other holding a...

If atheism is important to me, my sense of ancestry is its equal.

If the streets shackled my right leg, the schools shackled my left. Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later.

If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, wrote Du Bois, it was good Negro government.

Il mondo nero cresceva davanti ai miei occhi, e per la prima volta capivo che quel mondo non era solo il negativo di quello della gente che si crede bianca. L’America Bianca è un’organizzazione schier...

In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage.

In a democracy, so the saying goes, the people get the government they deserve. Part of Obama’s genius is a remarkable ability to soothe race consciousness among whites. Any black person who’s worked...