Guess quote

Ta-Nehisi Coates [1975-0] American

Rank: 101
Journalist, Writer

Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates is an American writer, journalist, and educator. Coates is a national correspondent for The Atlantic, where he writes about cultural, social and political issues, particularly as they regard African-Americans.

Anger, Dad, Forgiveness

Quote	Tags	Rank
I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius.		101
It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.		102
You can't tolerate anybody attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with force.		103
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.		104
We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.		105
We look at young black kids with a scowl on their face, walking a certain way down the block with their sweatpants dangling, however, with their hoodies on. And folks think that this is a show of power or a show of force. But I know, because I've been among those kids, it ultimately is fear.		106
I just think that if one is going to preach nonviolence and one is going to advocate for nonviolence, one's standard should be consistent.		107
I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a mistake.		108
The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in.		109
You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do.		110
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.		111
The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that.		112
When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.		113
'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies.		114
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.		115
My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.	Dad	116
I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.		117
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.	Anger	118
I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.		119
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.		120
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.	Forgiveness	121
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.		122
If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow.		123
It's very hard to be black in this country and hate America. It's really hard to live like that. I would actually argue it's impossible to fully see yourself.		124
African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginning. Before the beginning.		125
Somebody once told me, black people, in and of themselves, are cosmopolitan. There's cosmopolitanism within the black experience. There's an incredible amount.		126
I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don't think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don't think it is. It's just true.		201
I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record of hiring African-American writers. It was really that simple. And I think with the proliferation of the Internet and Internet media, it has been a little harder to maintain that gatekeeper position.		202
For me, my writing benefits from my experience.		203
I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate.		204
There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the White House - who are not by any means poor, but are very much afflicted by white supremacy.		205
One of the things that's really, really present in 'Between the World and Me' is, I am in some ways outside of the African-American tradition.		206
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.		207
The African-American tradition, in the main, is very, very church-based, very, very Christian. It accepts, you know, certain narratives about the world. I didn't really have that present in my house.		208
The president of the United States is not a king. You know? Barack Obama was elected by the American people.		209
I love living around black people. Home is home. We suffer under racism and the physical deprivations that come with that, but beneath that, we form cultures and traditions that are beautiful.		210
I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it.		211
The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.		212
The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history. Much of that violence, at least to some extent, you know, done by the very state that's supposed to protect them.		213
We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.		214
People know things and have a remarkable capacity to act in their individual immediate interests all the time.		215
I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done.		216
I'm not going to break up my family, not for a book.		217
There isn't a dude outside my dad who had greater influence on my life.		218
I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened.		219
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.		220
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.		221
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.		222
I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, and I would cut on the TV, and I would watch a show like 'The Wonder Years,' or I would watch, you know, some other show like 'Family Ties.'		223
When you write, you're inside the project. You can't really think about the reception. It has to be worth it even if no one reads it.		224
The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.		225
I feel some need to represent where I'm from. But ultimately, I think my only real responsibility is to - as much as possible - interrogate my own truths. This is to say not merely writing what I think is true, but using the writing to turn that alleged truth over and over, to stress-test it, in the aim of producing something readable.		226
I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly expressed.		301
I wasn't the biggest Captain America fan, but increasingly, I see him as a great character. Winter Soldier really got into what it meant to actually represent America.		302
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.		303
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.		304
I feel sorry for people who only know comic books through movies. I really do.		305
When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what.		306
There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos.		307
Racism is a physical experience.		308
The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too.		309
As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories in their lifetime or even in their children's lifetime or even in their grandchildren's lifetime. So fatalism isn't really an option.		310
It's kind of selfish to say that you're only going to fight for a victory that you will live to see.		311
I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.'		312
Everybody thinks that an important book has to be a big, long book.		313
I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. Obviously, I have something that I want to say that's very, very important to me - but the process of actually crafting it is essential.		314
It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.		315
Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected.		316
It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.		317
I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly and directly as I can. I don't want to cut it or make it easy, but be as direct as I can.		318
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.		319
In comics, you have to imagine what happens. I really loved it; I loved collecting. I loved following the adventures and figuring out what was going to happen next. I was a huge X-Men fan; I was a huge Spider-Man fan, and, to large degree, I remain one. It's literature for me; it's art.		320
We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that contradicts that.		321

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