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Ta-Nehisi Coates QUOTES

161 " My understanding of the universe was physical, and its moral arc bent toward chaos then concluded in a box. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

162 " I knew that Prince was not killed by a single officer so much as he was murdered by his country and all the fears that have marked it from birth. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

163 " Black-on-black crime” is jargon, violence to language, which vanishes the men who engineered the covenants, who fixed the loans, who planned the projects, who built the streets and sold red ink by the barrel. 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 sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

164 " the old mantra—“Either I can beat him or the police.” I understood it all—the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. 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 America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

165 " Hate gives identity. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

166 " not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

167 " One racist act. It's all it takes. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

168 " Her disposition toward life was that of an elite athlete who knows the opponent is dirty and the refs are on the take, but also knows the championship is one game away. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

169 " Would rather live white than live free. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

170 " The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

Ta-Nehisi Coates QUOTES

171 " this. To yell “black-on-black crime” is to shoot a man and then shame him for bleeding. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

172 " was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people’s interests. The library was open, unending, free. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

173 " Seven years after I saw the pictures of those doors, I received my first adult passport. I wish I had come to it sooner. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

174 " Fail to comprehend the streets and you gave up your body now. But fail to comprehend the schools and you gave up your body later. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

175 " so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

176 " 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 tobacco-spitting oaf, then something just as fantastic—an orc, troll, or gorgon. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

177 " Sell cigarettes without the proper authority and your body can be destroyed. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

178 " The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

179 " What was required was a new story, a new history told through the lens of our struggle. I had always known this, had heard the need for a new history in Malcolm, had seen the need addressed in my father’s books. It was in the promise behind their grand titles—Children of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Kushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization. Here was not just our history but the history of the world, weaponized to our noble ends. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me

180 " What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. "

― Ta-Nehisi Coates , Between the World and Me