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"My work is to give you what I know of my own particular path while allowing you to walk your own."
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Exlpore more Adversity quotes
"Adversity is inevitable. Staying positive is optional."
"Bad things bring out the real you, the person hidden beneath all those layers of comfort."
"We become wiser by adversity; prosperity destroys our appreciation of the right."
"Prosperity is the blessing of the Old Testament; adversity is the blessing of the New."
"If man could write his own fate, he would have designed his journey to be without obstacles. Yet all obstacles come with valuable lessons designed just for you and only you. Suffering is imposed on us time and again so that one day we would become brave wise masters. That is, a strong being who is confidently aware of their intended direction in life, and fearlessly adding value to the world and their future."
"Adversity draws men together and produces beauty and harmony in life's relationships, just as the cold of winter produces ice-flowers on the window-panes, which vanish with the warmth."
"Initially, I know that I handled it worse than she did and I think partly because I've always been... every bit of adversity I've faced up until the last year and a half is adversity I brought upon myself - or the opposing teams have given me."
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains."
"My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers-even the answers they themselves believed. I don't know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being 'politically conscious-as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty."
"Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy-in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America's rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy."
"You may have heard the talk of diversity, sensitivity training, and body cameras. These are all fine and applicable, but they understate the task and allow the citizens of this country to pretend that there is real distance between their own attitudes and those of the ones appointed to protect them. The truth is that the police reflect America in all of its will and fear, and whatever we might make of this country's criminal justice policy, it cannot be said that it was imposed by a repressive minority."
"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."
"I thank my mother (Ma, you're only second cause you got the dedication), who used to make me write essays whenever I got into trouble, explaining exactly what I'd done and why I'd done it."
"I came to see the streets and the schools as the arms of the same beast. One enjoyed the official power of the state while the other enjoyed its implicit sanction. But fear and violence were the weaponry of both."
"By the time I visited those battlefields, I knew that they had been retrofitted as the staging ground for a great deception, and this was my only security, because they could no longer insult me by lying to me. I knew-and the most important thing I knew was that, somewhere deep with them, they knew too. I like to think that knowing might have kept me from endangering you, that having understood and acknowledged the anger, I could control it. I like to think that it could have allowed me to speak the needed words to the woman and then walk away. I like to think this, but I can't promise it. The struggle is really all I have for you because it is the only portion of this world under your control."
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