Ta-Nehisi Coates quote: "You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this."

I think riots happen when communities are under pressure for long periods of time. That's not a ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I love living around black people. Home is home. We suffer under racism and the physical deprivation...
TA-NEHISI COATES

It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that...
TA-NEHISI COATES

We are all losers in comparison to Malala Yousafzai. But we are not all geniuses. Like me.
TA-NEHISI COATES

We look at young black kids with a scowl on their face, walking a certain way down the block with th...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I feel like my job is to look at the world and to report what I see, to write what I see as honestly...
TA-NEHISI COATES

My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied wit...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I love America the way I love my family - I was born into it. And there's no escape out of it.
TA-NEHISI COATES

'White America' is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and contro...
TA-NEHISI COATES

One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we d...
TA-NEHISI COATES

We want to believe racism is an artifact of the past, and if you have a political massacre, that con...
TA-NEHISI COATES

My belief is in the chaos of the world and that you have to find your peace within the chaos and tha...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in.
TA-NEHISI COATES

The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black...
TA-NEHISI COATES

When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 10...
TA-NEHISI COATES

When you write, you're inside the project. You can't really think about the reception. It ha...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I think a lot about the private emotions of black people - what we feel and yet is rarely publicly e...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself t...
TA-NEHISI COATES

Racism is a physical experience.
TA-NEHISI COATES

There are plenty of African-Americans in this country - and I would say this goes right up to the Wh...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I feel some need to represent where I'm from. But ultimately, I think my only real responsibilit...
TA-NEHISI COATES

There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

African Americans are one of the oldest ethnic groups in this country. We been here since the beginn...
TA-NEHISI COATES

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the ma...
TA-NEHISI COATES

Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-Amer...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The lives of African-Americans in this country are characterized by violence for most of our history...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I enjoy the challenge of trying to say things beautifully. The message is secondary in that sense. O...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I wasn't the biggest Captain America fan, but increasingly, I see him as a great character. Wint...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there&...
TA-NEHISI COATES

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.
TA-NEHISI COATES

It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my m...
TA-NEHISI COATES

You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourse...
TA-NEHISI COATES

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about m...
TA-NEHISI COATES

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books t...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I was about 13 or 14 when I heard Malcolm X's speech 'Message to the Grass Roots.'
TA-NEHISI COATES

As an African-American, we stand on the shoulders of people who fought despite not seeing victories ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I constantly write about my safety walking to and from school, and then I would come home at night, ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

You can't tolerate anybody attempting to threaten or intimidate your body. You must respond with...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intelle...
TA-NEHISI COATES

Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were s...
TA-NEHISI COATES

When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don&...
TA-NEHISI COATES

My dad always associated information with liberation. He was very much in that Malcolm X tradition.
TA-NEHISI COATES

I was peace pipes and treaties. My style was to talk and duck. It was an animal tactic, playing dead...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life—love the dogs that rent th...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I remembered that once, as a child, I was filled with wonder, that I had marveled at tri-folded scie...
TA-NEHISI COATES

You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine...
TA-NEHISI COATES

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they the...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I think at places like 'Slate' or the magazine where I work, there was a really poor record ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I do understand how hate eats at the soul and how to purge yourself of hate.
TA-NEHISI COATES

You can oppose reparations all you want, but you got to know the facts. You really, really do.
TA-NEHISI COATES

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this te...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The essential relationship across American history between black people and white people is one of e...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The American real-estate industry believed segregation to be a moral principle. As late as 1950, the...
TA-NEHISI COATES

[Clyde Ross] was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bother...
TA-NEHISI COATES

From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legiti...
TA-NEHISI COATES

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy.
TA-NEHISI COATES

You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious a...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon ...
TA-NEHISI COATES

When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans na...
TA-NEHISI COATES

Our art is made in cities like New York by people who are running from other places. They feel thems...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I do not believe we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I...
TA-NEHISI COATES

Dylan's voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B...
TA-NEHISI COATES

In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned lan...
TA-NEHISI COATES

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before al...
TA-NEHISI COATES

Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and the...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist...
TA-NEHISI COATES

In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legi...
TA-NEHISI COATES

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has neve...
TA-NEHISI COATES

The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free.
TA-NEHISI COATES

I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interest...
TA-NEHISI COATES

One Saturday morning last May, I joined the presidential motorcade as it slipped out of the southern...
TA-NEHISI COATES

You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at...
TA-NEHISI COATES

I think it was like playing somebody in tennis who's a little better than you. You get better just b...
AL COATES

There are things that went wrong in the front office and the chain of command. But those are things ...
AL COATES

Particularly in the first period, he made two or three key saves that if one or two go in, maybe cha...
AL COATES

Hopefully we can get through this quickly and get back to full strength.
AL COATES

For the most part, the game had been decided by then. We had a really solid game plan and the team e...
AL COATES

I'm so not scary. I'm a pussycat. But what are you going to do, right? I mean, these cheekbo...
KIM COATES

It was a lot more fun working with film.
ANNE COATES

I like meeting the people. I'm a theatre person.
ANNE COATES

Take jobs where you can.
ANNE COATES

Preview days are the worst days of your life.
ANNE COATES

Stephen shoots just enough coverage.
ANNE COATES

Otherwise the investment which has gone in has been a waste up until now.
ANDREW COATES

In general, one has to ask why complete the International Space Station anyway. One worries about pu...
ANDREW COATES

The knock-on effects to the International Space Station are quite dramatic ... (long delays) could p...
ANDREW COATES

As water comes off the rings, it is split by sunlight; the resulting hydrogen and atomic oxygen are ...
ANDREW COATES

Venus provides an extreme test for the atmospheric physics models that we have for Earth.
ANDREW COATES

Venus was born with the same sorts of constituents as Earth, which means there was some water in the...
ANDREW COATES

There never was a chip, it is said, that Bill Gates couldn't slow down with a new batch of features.
JAMES COATES

I know people have tattooed my 'Sons of Anarchy' photos, they've painted them, on their ...
KIM COATES

What we generally fail to realize is that in talking today to the Indians we are face to face with t...
AUSTIN COATES

When I decided to go to university I didn't know what I wanted to do. When I had an opportunity ...
KIM COATES

These volunteers are wonderful. Some have been here since 5:30 this morning setting up and directing...
CAROLYN COATES

They want a jury that can say, 'I've heard about this case, but I can set aside what I've heard, fol...
BILL COATES

We were busy everyday, it didn't really get slow until we had that window when we were coming home.
BILL COATES

I wasn't going to die wondering why we didn't win, like we didn't win (when competing with) Brisbane...
JOHN COATES

The Ivy League is definitely part of the third that's a reach. The [CAA] conference itself is much b...
ROY COATES

The Ivy League is a step up for the most part.
ROY COATES

Limonene has been around forever, carbon dioxide as well. What we've been able to do is devise this ...
GEOFFREY COATES

This has always been about the fact that the Michigan wine industry has been so successful that (dis...
RICK COATES

And now they're looking at having the rules change.
RICK COATES

I know for a fact that most of our smaller wineries would have to close up under provisions of that ...
RICK COATES

The typical exposure has been an occasional lapse for a variety of reasons -- the condom broke, the ...
TOM COATES

Stadiums are generally going to be used 85 or 90 times a year - between a couple of games prior to t...
DENNIS COATES

If you think they're going to substitute between different kinds of spending, then there's no new sp...
DENNIS COATES

Should the Colts happen to win the Super Bowl, that would have an effect.
DENNIS COATES

They've changed their stance, which is good, which is a positive and the market has taken that posit...
MICHAEL COATES

Emily and Sarah were very outstanding. Elena also did quite well.
ROY COATES

We appreciate all our sponsors who support us here at the center.
CAROLYN COATES

We also have our own library, because sometimes seniors forget about taking books back and they have...
CAROLYN COATES

They focused on their game, not searching on the screens to see who's got what. Amy was totally rela...
TOM COATES

Getting people stranded on their rooftops to safety is a priority. We want to get people out because...
FRANK COATES

Looters are hitting food stores, they're hitting department stores, they're in jewelry stores and gu...
FRANK COATES

People need to take this very seriously and get to a safe area while they can.
FRANK COATES

I'm getting deluged by people wanting to know more, ... It's fun to talk to people envisioning other...
GEOFFREY COATES

We're really excited about not only using a byproduct from the orange juice industry but also from t...
GEOFFREY COATES

The issues are still on the table, but there's been no decision at this time,
LINDA COATES

That means that just about every mare that could have gotten pregnant did, ... This is the first tim...
LINDA COATES

If the public decides they're not in favor of fertility control, we have only one option left - gath...
LINDA COATES

That means that just about every mare that could have gotten pregnant did, ... This is the first tim...
LINDA COATES

It means if the board doesn't make a ruling in 45 days, we'll have to shut the program down for this...
LINDA COATES

They seem to be able to handle these catastrophic events and survive,
LINDA COATES

The longer you drift the more you will learn. What you learn affects the kind of person you end up t...
CHANG TA-CHUN

The best, the most exquisite automobile is a walking stick; and one of the finest things in life is ...
ROBERT COATES HOLLIDAY

Greatness is achieving something unimaginable and doing that feat with ease
LEE S COATES

Is there anywhere else to sleep tonight... Anywhere?' I pleaded.
There's Mei's office, but you'...
TA'AFULI ANDREW FIU

Ta-Nehisi Coates

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