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"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."
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"When you write by hand, you don't have the excessive freedom of a computer. When I write down something, I have to be serious about it. I have to ask myself, "Is this necessary at this point in the book?"
"When you are imprisoned by the rules of conformity, it tames your imaginative capacity and steals your free thinking abilities."
"Liberation begins with liberation of mind, soul and body."
"You are not, though, forgiving so as to let others off with things. You are forgiving so that you can empower yourself to get over it and become strong."
"No man can claim to be free in real terms unless he is fully in control of his own destiny!"
Explore more quotes by Ta-Nehisi Coates
"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."
"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."
"I think one has to even abandon the phrase 'ally' and understand that you are not helping someone in a particular struggle; the fight is yours."
"You and I, my son, are that 'below.' That was true in 1776. It is true today. There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream."
"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."
"The universe was playing with loaded dice, which insured an excess of cowards in our ranks."
"You do not give your precious body to the billy clubs of Birmingham sheriffs, nor to the insidious activity of the streets."
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