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"The Struggle is in your name, Samori - you were named for Samori Toure, who struggled against French colonizers for the right to his own black body. He died in captivity, but the profits of that struggle and others like it are ours, even when the object of our struggle, as is so often true, escapes our grasp."
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"It does not do to rely too much on silent majorities, Evey, for silence is a fragile thing, one loud noise, and its gone. But the people are so cowed and disorganised. A few might take the opportunity to protest, but it'll just be a voice crying in the wilderness. Noise is relative to the silence preceding it. The more absolute the hush, the more shocking the thunderclap. Our masters have not heard the people's voice for generations, Evey and it is much, much louder than they care to remember."

"Some of us fought back with guns and assassinations. Others fought back with a little hot dog stand on the corner."

"As I got closer to the fence, I held my shirt over my nose to block the smell. One stallion waded through the muck and whinnied angrily at me. He bared his teeth, which were pointed like a bear's.I tried to talk to him in my mind. I can do that with most horses.I'm going to clean your stables. Won't that be great?Come inside! Eat you! Tasty half-blood!Usually this gets me VIP treatment in the equestrian world, not this time.Poseidon can come in, too! We will eat you both! Seafood! The other horses chimed in as they waded through the field."

"The fulcrum of resistance is in your mind where you pit yourself against the weight of the external."

"And if we burn, you burn with us."

"She saw the faces streaming past her, the faces made alike by fear-fear as a common denominator, fear of themselves, fear of all and of one another, fear making them ready to pounce upon whatever was held sacred by any single one they met... She had kept herself clean and free in a single passion-to touch nothing. She had liked facing them in the streets, she had liked the impotence of their hatred, because she offered them nothing to be hurt."

"Because I know the things I should be able to accomplish, and I don't want to do so."

"A flicker of defiance flared very briefly in Rincewind's battered heart."

"I won't fatten them in cages, though. I won't ply them with poisoned fruit items. I won't change them into clockwork images or talking shadows. I won't drain out their life's blood. They can do all those things for themselves."

"To the everlasting credit of the people of District 12, not one person claps. Not even the ones holding betting slips, the ones who are usually beyond caring. Possibly because they know me from the Hob, or knew my father, or have encountered Prim, who no one could help loving. So instead of acknowledging applause, I stand there unmoving while they take part in the boldest form of dissent they can manage. Silence. Which says we do not agree. We do not condone. All of this is wrong."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

"My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own."

"Some of us make it out. But the game is played with loaded dice. I wish I had known more, and I wished I had known it sooner."

"America's indispensable working class existed as property beyond the realm of politics, leaving white Americans free to trumpet their love of freedom and democratic values."

"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."

"Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing 'mere about symbols."

"Racism is, among other things, the unearned skepticism of one group of humans joined to the unearned sympathy for another."

"The pursuit of knowing was freedom to me, the right to declare your own curiosities and follow them through all manner of books. I was made for the library, not the classroom. The classroom was a jail of other people's interests. The library was open, unending, free. Slowly, I was discovering myself."

"To question what I see, then to question what I see after that, because the questions matter as much, perhaps more than, the answers."

"I had thought that I must mirror the outside world, create a carbon copy of white claims to civilization. It was beginning to occur to me to question the logic of the claim itself... I was was only beginning to learn to be wary of my own humanity, of my own hurt and anger - I didn't yet realize that the boot on your neck is just as likely to make you delusional as it is to ennoble."
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