1
2
3
5
8
12
20
33
52
83
133
213
340
543
867
1384
2208
3346
3522
5443
5619
6757
6830
6831
6832
6833
6834
7581
8098
8422
8625
8752
8832
8882
8913
8932
8945
8953
8957
8960
8962
8963
8964
8965
▲
▼
| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| e8ef27f | I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers .. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5d07bb8 | It is a lie- one that makes your life of philosophy possible. We studied a lot together. And yet in all our time we never studied a single nation founded on truth and candor. My teachers were imaginative and visionary. But they dug no wells, built no walls, fed no children. The best of them were only men of theory." "But we were Wakanda. We were the Golden City. We were supposed to be exceptional." "We still are are Wakanda. And we will alw.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| ce90dea | I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear fo.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 046e9a1 | I was not in any slave ship. Or perhaps I was, because so much of what I'd felt in Baltimore, the sharp hatred, the immortal wish, and the timeless will, I saw in Hayden's work. And that was what I heard in Malcolm, but never like this - quiet, pure, and unadorned. I was learning the craft of poetry, which really was an intensive version of what my mother had taught me all those years ago - the craft of writing as the art of thinking. Poetr.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e03b6b4 | What I am saying is that it does not all belong to you, that the beauty in you is not strictly yours and is largely the result of enjoying an abnormal amount of security in your black body. Perhaps | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4a709ae | And she could not lean on her country for help. When it came to her son, Dr. Jones's country did what it does best-- it forgot him. The forgetting is habit, is yet another necessary component of the Dream. They have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs. They have forgotten, because to remember would .. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c801f82 | 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. Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" I judged them against the country I knew, which had a.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 97ebc5b | A society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 6f62c2c | The Dream thrives on generalization, on limiting the number of possible questions, on privileging immediate answers. The Dream is the enemy of all art, courageous thinking, and honest writing. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| fd7d597 | You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f2ee62a | Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive passivity, or conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never ou.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7f48174 | I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 66d3a62 | The next day I got up early and walked through the city. I visited the Musee Rodin. I stopped in a bistro, and with all the fear of a boy approaching a beautiful girl at a party, I ordered two beers and then a burger. I walked to Le Jardin du Luxembourg. It was about four o'clock in the afternoon. I took a seat. The garden was busting with people, again in all their alien ways. At that moment a strange loneliness took hold. Perhaps it was t.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 83c6b01 | This is the foundation of the Dream--its adherents must not just believe in it but believe that it is just, believe that their possession of the Dream is the natural result of grit, honor, and good works | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 8efed5f | You must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 84b0af3 | We are not blind to recent events, Tetu. Nor are we blind to Damisa-Sakri's allies. But we are, as you say, a new country, a new nation. Prudence is required." "Even in your allies." " Especially our allies." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4554a3a | We know who you are. We know of your battles with the king. We think you may well prove to be a true friend of our cause. But right now all we share are kind words and a common enemy. That is not yet enough. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 227b27b | I do not think your problem is an old philosopher. I do not think your problem is the renegade Dora Milaje. Your problem, T'Challa... is the people. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5b27ddd | For my people I have battled world-breakers, death cultists, and men who would make themselves gods. For my people, I lost the only woman I ever truly loved. There is nothing left, Mother. I have given it all." "No, T'Challa. Let us not mince words here-- you have never given willingly. You feel the weight of the crown, but you have never felt the great honor of being king. Your people are a burden to you, and you have never let them forget.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 7227e0f | I am Damisa-sakri. And there is no escape. Not for my enemies. Not for my people. Not for my mother. Not for me. So much rage. So much hate. I must master all of it. I must not let it master me. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| cfa0424 | These men are Wakandan, even in rebellion. Pride in their nation was everything to them. And when the Golden City fell, they fell with it. Now they fashion their very bodies into living bombs, for they measure their lives in the blood of others. I know what haunts them-- shame, hate, rage. I know what shall save them. The Golden City fell. But Wakanda has not yet died. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 07f0fb5 | Poetry aims for an economy of truth--loose and useless words must be discarded, | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 27a39e0 | I come back to the motherland and this is the thanks I get?" "Still better than the knife-wielding thugs I found in Harlem, Misty. You do remember, don't you?" "I resent the term "thug"." "That's 'cause you a thug." "For life." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9b6df17 | You... kill... what you cannot control. Break... what you cannot bend. Is this what all my teachings have brought you to? Victory by any means? Conquest? Terror? You say you oppose kings, and yet your methods do not differ from theirs. You say you war against tyranny, but you too war against your own people. You say you bring the power of life. Then how did it happen that your very name became death? | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| aca8533 | The question with no answer. This is what you wished us to consider. But there was an answer. And you knew it. "What is our remedy against the robber, who so broke into our house?" We burn down the house-- with the robber inside." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 9b3fe72 | Enslaved" is what the plunderer does to a righteous woman but "a slave" is a righteous woman who has accepted the plunderer's law." | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| e1041e9 | 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. A nation outlives it generations. We were not there when Washington crossed the Delawre, but Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze's rendering has meaning to us. We were not there when Woodrow Wilson took us into World War I, but we are still paying ou.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 336cd71 | Black is beautiful | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 86d7fef | You exist. You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 862540c | When Abraham Lincoln declared, in 1863, that the battle of Gettysburg must ensure 'that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth,' he was not merely being aspirational; at the onset of the Civil War, the United States of America had one of the highest rates of suffrage in the world. The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant 'government of the people' but what our country has, throughout .. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 4322fc6 | All of these heroes had failed to cajole and coerce the masters of America. Their ambition of a better world had been frustrated. This was the story of my ancestors, the story I expected for myself. These were not stories of hope, but were they without import? If Celia, Margaret, and Ida had failed to help the country at large locate its morality, they had succeeded in living by their own. And that was all they could control. Within the sma.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| c0c6582 | Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body - it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor - it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so r.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 3129067 | I am speaking to you as I always have - as the sober and serious man I have always wanted you to be, who does not apologize for his human feelings, who does not make excuses for his height, his long arms, his beautiful smile. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable. None of that can change the math anyway. I never wanted you to be twice as good a.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| f44a11b | I did not want to raise you in fear or false memory. I did not want you forced to mask your joys and bind your eyes. What I wanted for you was to grow into consciousness. I resolved to hide nothing from you. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 3e535c9 | I sought a world where peasants and kings were as brothers. But what new world was ever made without the sword? Now I am old, and I fear that some young dreamer shall resolve my contradiction, and commit to that which is both terrible and plain. On that day the era of theory will have passed. All the dreamers will be dead. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| b114c51 | I will be king. Your country needs me. I'm gonna bring out the best in Wakanda. And what is best in Wakanda is that fantastic pile of vibranium. I'm gonna make 'em love me, baby. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 171065b | Racism--the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them--inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 5a8846d | Before the president spoke, George Zimmerman was arguably the most reviled man in America. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of racism begins with Tawana Brawley and ends with the Duke lacrosse team. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 963aa36 | The irony of Barack Obama is this: He has become the most successful black politician in American history by avoiding the radioactive racial issues of yesteryear, by being "clean" (as Joe Biden once labeled him)--and yet his indelible blackness irradiates everything he touches. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts--one, a.. | Ta-Nehisi Coates | ||
| 620c94d | suspicion, experience, perception, common sense--for Maston these were not the organs of fact. Paper was fact, Ministers were fact, | John le Carré | ||
| 9a90164 | there is nothing arrogant about mentioning ordinary people's material concerns: the poor have the right to do it, and to talk about a readiness for great sacrifices, or suffering 'whatever the price', is as a rule the ideology of the privileged, who are quite content to let the people suffer for them. | Slavoj Žižek | ||
| f197e3c | Critics such as Slavoj Zizek accuse him of being a poster child for the cultural excesses of postmodern capitalism ("Ongoing 'Soft Revolution'"). A recent round of denunciations underwritten by a mix of wonderment and red-baiting exclaim, "The founder of BuzzFeed wrote his senior thesis on the Marxism of Deleuze and Guattari!," adding to a long list of guilty associations--"the Israeli Defense Force reads A Thousand Plateaus!," "Deleuze spo.. | Andrew Culp | ||
| bd2e2bc | What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? As Hegel was already well aware, there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing, which equals its mortification. This violence operates at multiple levels. Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as aut.. | Slavoj Žižek | ||
| 28a9015 | Se no passado fingimos publicamente acreditar enquanto permaneciamos ceticos na vida privada, ou ainda envolvidos na troca obscena de nossas crencas publicas, hoje tendemos publicamente a professar nossa atitude cetica, hedonista e relaxada, enquanto na vida privada continuamos acossados pelas crencas e proibicoes severas. Nisso consiste, para Jacques Lacan, a consequencia paradoxal da experiencia de que "Deus esta morto". (...) O ateu mode.. | Slavoj Žižek |