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"Our teachers urged us toward the example of freedom marchers, Freedom Riders, and Freedom Summers, and it seemed that the month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera. The black people in these films seemed to love the worst things in life - love the dogs that rent their children apart, the tear gas that clawed at their lungs, the firehorses that tore off their clothes and tumbled them into the streets. They seemed to love the men who raped them, the women who cursed them, love the children who spat on them, the terrorists that bombed them. Why are they showing this to us? Why were only our heroes nonviolent? I speak not of the morality of nonviolence, but of the sense that blacks are in especial need of this morality."
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"Religion has kept all of us suffocated, I can't raise my voice you can't raise your voice, still they call us fundamentalists."
"Speaking generally punishment hardens and numbs it produces concentration it sharpens the consciousness of alienation it strengthens the power of resistance."
"And then it hits me. They already have. They have kiled her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. They have chosen her as a tribute, then made her watch her sister fight to the death in the Games. She has been hurt far worse than I had at the age of twelve. And even that pales in comparison with Rue's life."
"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."
"A person who lives by the rules of the world cannot resist the devil, cannot fight him."
"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."
"We are on strike, we, the men of the mind.We are on strike against self-immolation. We are on strike against the creed of unearned rewards and unrewarded duties. We are on strike against the dogma that the pursuit of one's happiness is evil. We are on strike against the doctrine that life is guilt."
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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