Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, t...

And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a se...

And you are here now, and you must live—and there is so much out there to live for, not just in someone else’s country, but in your own home.

As slaves we were this country’s first windfall, the down payment on its freedom.

At the onset of the Civil War, our stolen bodies were worth four billion dollars, more than all of American industry, all of American railroads, workshops, and factories combined, and the prime produc...

Black is beautiful—which is to say that the black body is beautiful, that black hair must be guarded against the torture of processing and lye, that black skin must be guarded against bleach, that our...

Black is beautiful

Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that...

Breathing. I just dream of breathing

But I was a boy, seeing in him what boys can’t help but see in their fathers—a mold in which their own manhood might be cast.

But I was grounded and domesticated by the plain fact that should I now go down, I would not go down alone.

But all the magic I wanted was on the page. And when I looked closely, when I began to study, I did not even see magic, so much as a machinery so elegant, so wondrous, so imaginative as to seem supern...

But even more, the changes have taught me how to best exploit that singular gift of study, to question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps...

But families don’t exist independent of their environment.

But he said that his general optimism about the shape of American history remained unchanged. To be optimistic about the long-term trends of the United States doesn’t mean that everything is going to...

But more than any shame I feel about my own actual violence, my greatest regret was that in seeking to defend you I was, in fact, endangering you. I could have you arrested, he said. Which is to say,...

But my experience in this world has been that the people who believe themselves to be white are obsessed with the politics of personal exoneration. And the word racist, to them, conjures, if not a tob...

But rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land; through the flaying of backs; the chaining of limbs; the strangling of dissidents; the destruction of families.

But some time ago I rejected magic in all its forms. This rejection was a gift from your grandparents, who never tried to console me with ideas of an afterlife and were skeptical of preordained Americ...

But the price of error ishigher for you than it is foryour countrymen, and sothat America might justifyitself, the story of a blackbody’s destruction mustalways begin with his orher error, real or ima...