618 Quotes by 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."

"J'ai commencé à comprendre que le but de mon éducation était une forme d'inconfort, un processus qui n'était pas destiné à me récompenser avec mon propre Rêve personnel mais qui, au contraire, devait briser tous les rêves, tous les mythes réconfortants de l'Afrique, de l'Amérique, de toutes les parties du monde, pour me laisser face à l'humanité dans ce qu'elle a de plus terrible."

"When the Dutch ambassador tried to humiliate her by refusing her a seat, Nzinga had shown her power by ordering one of her advisers to all fours to make a human chair of her body. That was the kind of power I sought..."

"In those days I imagined racism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body. From that perspective, it seemed possible that the success of one man really could alter history, or even end it."

"It was how I’d felt seeing Barack and Michelle during the inauguration, the car slow-dragging down Pennsylvania Avenue, the crowd cheering, and then the two of them rising up out of the limo, rising up from fear, smiling, waving, defying despair, defying history, defying gravity."

"She had wanted her son to stand for what he believed and to be respectful. And he had died for believing his friends had a right to play their music loud, to be American teenagers."

"The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte."

"When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible."

"It has been said that the first black presidency was mostly “symbolic,” a dismissal that deeply underestimates the power of symbols. Symbols don’t just represent reality but can become tools to change it."

"Don't give up your life, preserve your life," he would say. "And if you got to give it up, make it even-steven."