Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library is open, unending, free.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I thought of the great spectrum of The Mecca--black people from Belize, black people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers from Bangalore, black people from Toronto and Kingston, black people who spoke Russian, who spoke Spanish, who played Mongo Santamaría, who understood mathematics and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the enslaved. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I wanted Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus to immediately be obvious to you.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

This is your country, this is your world, this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

When you read a comic book, there's a space between what's happening on the panel and what you have to literally see in your mind. That's not true of movies, where you see everything.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Racism is a physical experience.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

When I see Bruce Banner becoming the Hulk, it's only a picture. My imagination has to do some of the work there, to impute feeling and everything. We're talking about something that's so surreal, it's just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a form that is not so literal.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of exploitation and one of plunder. This is not, you know, necessarily about, you know, whether you're a good person or not or whether you see black people, you know, on the street, and you're willing to shake their hands and be polite.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

I didn't start off as a journalist; I started off as a poet. My ambition was to practise poetry. Then I found journalism, but that other voice never fled from me.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that was exactly what was happening all around us.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

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

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates