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"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."
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"At a Chamber of Commerce networking breakfast, two of my friends and I were standing in a circle talking. A stranger approached, interrupted our little reunion, and gave each of us her card. She then began talking about herself and her business without a hint of social awareness, or care about her interruption. She even had the tactless gall to ask us for referrals. When she left our small circle, we looked at each other and laughed, "What was that?"
"Vigilance of the wisest kind is to incessantly remain open to the reality that what I 'see' is but a single thread and solitary shard of what 'is', for to assume otherwise is to surrender the wisdom of vigilance to the decay of ignorance."
"In our frenzied attempts to catch up with life, we run right past it. Once we have run past it, what we are in reality attempting to catch is ourselves."
"We are not consciousness, we are the byproducts of consciousness."
"God has said not to create any accounts (karmic). Create accounts (only) if you have the knowledge of the future. Hey! If you want to start an account, then why don't you account for the possibility that you may die tomorrow?"
"If you point to paradise, all the shortsighted will see is your finger."
"Dreams are reality for the subconscious mind, but wisdom is the perception of knowledge. Wisdom is the internalization of knowledge."
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."
"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."
"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."
"I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it."
"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."
"The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully. Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain."
"I wanted to pursue things, to know things, but I could not match the means of knowing that came naturally to me with the expectations of professors. 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 fore 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."
"The last slaveholder has been dead for a very long time. The last soldier to endure Valley Forge has been dead much longer. To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism A la carte."
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