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"From the day we touched these stolen shores, he'd explain to anyone who'd listen, they infected our minds. They deployed their phrenologists, their backward Darwinists, and forged a false Knowledge to keep us down. But against this demonology, there were those who battled back. Universities scorned them. Compromised professors scoffed at their names. So they published themselves and hawked their Knowledge at street fairs, churches, and bazaars.For their efforts, they were forgotten. Their great works languished out of print, while those they sought to save grew fat on integration and amnesia."
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"Each religion, by the help of more or less myth, which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul and enabling it to make its peace with its destiny."

"The house was left; the house was deserted. It was left like a shell on a sandhill to fill with dry salt grains now that life had left it. The long life seemed to have set in; the trifling airs, nibbling, the clammy breaths, fumbling, seemed to have triumphed. .."

"The quieter the mind the louder the soul."

"Raise your love so high that anger cannot reach it."

"Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn't murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn't murder lie; it doesn't establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn't murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn't murder hate. It may increase hate. It is always a descending spiral leading nowhere. This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multiplies evil and violence in the universe. It doesn't solve any problems."

"Peace by persuasion has a pleasant sound, but I think we should not be able to work it. We should have to tame the human race first, and history seems to show that that cannot be done."

"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word."

"Before you speak words of hatred, so count with peace in your voice to ten."

"Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates

"In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I'd realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all."

"The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter."

"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."

"Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time."

"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."

"Outside of hip-hop, it was in comics that I most often found the aesthetics and wisdom of my world reflected."

"There are no racists in America, or at least none that the people who need to be white know personally."

"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."

"I thought of the great spectrum of The Mecca - black people from Belize, black people with Jewish mothers, black people with fathers from Bangalore, black people from Toronto and Kingston, black people who spoke Russian, who spoke Spanish, who played Mongo SantamarAa, who understood mathematics and sat up in bone labs, unearthing the mysteries of the enslaved. There was more out there than I had ever hoped for, and I wanted you to have it. I wanted you to know that the world in its entirety could never be found in schools, alone, nor on the streets, alone, nor in the trophy case. I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I wanted 'Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus' to immediately be obvious to you."
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