Home > Work > Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
21 " Don't fight the system, mock the system "
― Trevor Noah , Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood
22 " Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. "
23 " It's a powerful experience, shitting. There's something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don't care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyonce shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away. You are never more yourself than when you're taking a shit. You have that moment where you realize, 'This is me. This is who I am. "
24 " —a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom. "
25 " My grandmother always told me that she loved my prayers. She believed my prayers were more powerful, because I prayed in English. Everyone knows that Jesus, who's white, speaks English. The Bible is in English. Yes, the Bible was not written in English, but the Bible came to South Africa in English so to us it's English. Which made my prayers the best prayers because English prayers get answered first. How do we know this? Look at white people. Clearly they're getting through to the right person. Add to that Matthew 19:14. "Suffer little children to come unto me," Jesus said, "for theirs is the kingdom of heaven." So if a child is praying in English? To White Jesus? That's a powerful combination right there. "
26 " When he said that, my body just let go. I remember the exact traffic light I was at. For a moment there was a complete vacuum of sound and then I cried tears like I had never cried before. I collapsed in heaving sobs and moans. I cried as if every other thing I'd cried for in my life had been a waste of crying. I cried so hard that if my present crying seld could go back in time and see my other crying selves, it would slap them and say, "That's shit's not worth crying for." My cry was not a cry of sadness. It was not catharsis. It wasn't me feeling sad for myself. It was an expression of raw pain that came from an inability of my body to express that pain in any other way, shape or form. She was my mom. She was my teammate. It has always been me and her torgether, me and her against the world. When Andrew said, "shot her in the head," I broke in two. "
27 " As soon as things start going well for you in the hood, it's time to go. Because the hood will drag you back in. It will find a way. There will be a guy who steals a thing and puts it in your car and the cops find it - something. You can't stay. You think you can. You'll start doing better and you'll bring your hood friends out to a nice club, and the next thing you know somebody starts a fight and one of your friends pulls a gun and somebody's getting shot and you're left standing around going, 'What just happened?'The hood happened. "
28 " When I was twenty-four years old, one day out of the blue my mother said to me, “You need to find your father.” “Why?” I asked. At that point I hadn’t seen him in over ten years and didn’t think I’d ever see him again. “Because he’s a piece of you,” she said, “and if you don’t find him you won’t find yourself.” “I don’t need him for that,” I said. “I know who I am.” “It’s not about knowing who you are. It’s about him knowing who you are, and you knowing who he is. Too many men grow up without their fathers, so they spend their lives with a false impression of who their father is and what a father should be. You need to find your father. You need to show him what you’ve become. You need to finish that story. "
29 " The hood was strangely comforting, but comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling. "
30 " You cannot blame anyone else for What you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices. "
31 " Learn from your past and be better because of your past," she would say, "but don't cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don't hold on to it. Don't be bitter. "
32 " You didn’t know your dog was deaf?” “No, we thought it was stupid. "
33 " For the million people who lied in Soweto, there were no stores, no bars, no restaurants. There were no paved roads, minimal electricity, inadequate sewerage. But when you put one million people together in one place, they find a way to make life for themselves. "
34 " If you're black in south Africa, speaking English is the one thing that can give you a leg up. [...] If you're standing in the dock, English is the difference between getting off with a fine or going to prison. "
35 " Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA. "
36 " An der H. A. Jack School erkannte ich, dass ich schwarz war. Vor meinem Erlebnis im Pausenhof hatte ich mich nie entscheiden müssen, doch als ich dazu gezwungen wurde, entschied ich mich für schwarz. Die Welt betrachtete mich als farbig, aber ich verbrachte mein Leben nicht damit, mich selbst zu betrachten. Ich betrachtete andere Menschen. Ich sah mich so, wie ich die anderen Menschen um mich herum sah, und diese Menschen waren schwarz. - S. 77 "
37 " My mom would always say, "My job is to feed your body, feed your spirit, and feed your mind. "
38 " Nelson Mandela once said, "If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart." He was so right. When you make the effort to speak someone else's language, even if it's just basic phrases here and there, you are saying to them, "I understand that you have a culture and identity that exists beyond me. I see you as a human being. "
39 " Why show him the world when he’s never going to leave the ghetto?”“Because,” she would say, “even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I’ve done enough. "
40 " The white neighborhoods of Johannesburg were built on white fear—fear of black crime, fear of black uprisings and reprisals—and as a result virtually every house sits behind a six-foot wall, and on top of that wall is electric wire. Everyone lives in a plush, fancy maximum-security prison. There is no sitting on the front porch, no saying hi to the neighbors, no kids running back and forth between houses. I’d ride my bike around the neighborhood for hours without seeing a single kid. I’d hear them, though. They were all meeting up behind brick walls for playdates I wasn’t invited to. I’d hear people laughing and playing and I’d get off my bike and creep up and peek over the wall and see a bunch of white kids splashing around in someone’s swimming pool. I was like a Peeping Tom, but for friendship. It was only after a year or so that I figured out the key to making black friends in the suburbs: the children of domestics." (from "Born A Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood" by Trevor Noah) "