The Message Quotes

“You cannot act upon what you cannot see. And we are plagued by dead language and dead stories that serve people whose aim is nothing short of a dead world. And it is not enough to stand against these dissemblers. There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“It may seem strange that people who have already attained a position of power through violence invest so much time in justifying their plunder with words. But even plunderers are human beings whose violent ambitions must contend with the guilt that gnaws at them when they meet the eyes of their victims. And so a story must be told, one that raises a wall between themselves and those they seek to throttle and rob.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I don’t really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“The Trump years amazed a certain kind of white person; they had no reference for national vulgarity, for such broad corruption and venality, until it was too late. The least reflective of them say, “This is not America.” But some of them suspect that it is America, and there is great pain in understanding that, without your consent, you are complicit in a great crime, in learning that the whole game was rigged in your favor, that there are nations within your nation who have spent all of their collective lives in the Trump years. The pain is in the discovery of your own illegitimacy—that whiteness is power and nothing else. I could hear that same pain in Avner’s and Guy’s words. They were raised under the story that the Jewish people were the ultimate victims of history. But they had been confronted with an incredible truth—that there was no ultimate victim, that victims and victimizers were ever flowing.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“An inhumane system demands inhumans, and so it produces them in stories, editorials, newscasts, movies, and television.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“If Palestinians are to be truly seen, it will be through stories woven by their own hands—not by their plunderers, not even by their comrades.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity. And you will need that hunger, because if you follow that path, soon enough you will find yourself confronting not just their myths, not just their stories, but your own. This is difficult, if only because so much of our myth-making was done in service of liberation, in doing whatever we could to dig our way out of the pit into which we were cast. And above us stand the very people who did the casting, jeering, tossing soil into our eyes and yelling down at us, “You’re doing it wrong.” But we are not them, and the standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do. We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I guess it’s worth pointing out the obvious—that the very governors and politicians who loudly exalt the values of free speech are among the most aggressive prosecutors of “divisive concepts.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Here is what I think: We have a right to our imagined traditions, to our imagined places, and those traditions and places are most powerful when we confess that they are imagined.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Oppressive power is preserved in the smoke and fog, and sometimes it is smuggled in the unexamined shadows of the language of the oppressed themselves.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame. And this power is an extension of the power of other curators of the culture—network execs, producers, publishers—whose core job is deciding which stories get told and which do not.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world. And both claims relied on excluding whole swaths of the population living under the rule of the state.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Journalists claim to be hearing “both sides” as though a binary opposition had been set down by some disinterested god. But it is the journalists themselves who are playing god—it is the journalists who decide which sides are legitimate and which are not, which views shall be considered and which pushed out of the frame.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“The danger we present, as writers, is not that we will simply convince their children of a different dogma but that we will convince them that they have the power to form their own.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“In fact, it is the whole reason race was invented. Africans had to either be excised from humanity or cast into the lower reaches to justify their exploitation.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Every single empire in its official discourse has said that it is not like all the others,” writes Edward Said. That its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort. And, sadder still, there always is a chorus of willing intellectuals to say calming words about benign or altruistic empires, as if one shouldn’t trust the evidence of one’s eyes watching the destruction and the misery and death brought by the latest mission civilizatrice.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I want to tell you I was wrong. I want to tell you that your oppression will not save you, that being a victim will not enlighten you, that it can just as easily deceive you. I learned that here. In Haifa. In Ramallah. And especially here at Yad Vashem.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But virtues should be signaled, and the signalers should act to make their virtues manifest. It is the latter, not the former, that is the problem.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I don’t really care much for hearing “both sides” or “opposing points of view,” so much as I care about understanding the literary tools deployed to advance those views—the discipline of voice, the use of verbs, the length and brevity of sentences, and the curiosity of mind behind those sentences.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Politics is the art of the possible, but art creates the possible of politics. A policy of welfare reform exists downstream from the myth of the welfare queen. Novels, memoirs, paintings, sculptures, statues, monuments, films, miniseries, advertisements, and journalism all order our reality. Jim Crow segregation—with its signage and cap-doffing rituals—was both policy and a kind of public theater. The arts tell us what is possible and what is not, because, among other things, they tell us who is human and who is not.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But I know how sadness can exert its own gravity, growing more powerful the longer it holds you.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“But when the light cleared I had new eyes, and I could see my own words in new ways—and the words from which they were derived—the stories, columns, speeches, and talks presented by “willing intellectuals.” So much seemed obvious. I now noted a symmetry in the bromides—that those who claimed Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East were just as likely to claim that America was the oldest democracy in the world.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“I walked away and found a seat in the shade, away from everyone. At this moment, all that I had seen across the days began to avalanche—the cave evictions, the massacre in Hebron, the monuments to genocide, the checkpoints, the wall of devouring, and so much more. Those who question Israel, who question what has been done with the moral badge of the Holocaust, are often pointed in the direction of the great evils done across the world. We are told that it is suspicious that, among all the ostensibly amoral states, we would single out Israel—as though the relationship between America and Israel is not itself singular. But the plaque was clear: “The spiritual bedrock of our values as a nation come from Jerusalem.” This effort that I saw, the use of archaeology, the destruction of ancient sites, the pushing of Palestinians out of their homes, had the specific imprimatur of the United States of America. Which means that it had my imprimatur. This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“So I don’t really worry about the young, whose excesses are confined to lecture halls and quadrangles, so much as I fear the old, whose tyrannies are legislative.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Imagine learning to swim by reading and memorizing the steps of a front crawl but never jumping into a pool. Why do we teach our students this way?”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Buried in the claim is another notion—that the worth of a people is defined by their possession of a homeland incorporated as a state. The Palestinians, lacking such a state, had no right to the land and perhaps no rights at all.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“And the great privilege of great power is an incuriosity about those who lack it. That incuriosity is what afflicts the dullest critics of safe spaces and the like. But if these writers, teachers, and administrators could part with the privilege of their own ignorance, they would see that they too need safe spaces, and that for their own sakes, they have made a safe space of nearly the entire world.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“When I was young, I felt the physical weight of race constantly. We had less. Our lives were more violent. And whether by genes, culture, or divine judgment, this was said to be our fault. The only tool to escape this damnation—for a lucky few—was school. Later I went out into the world and saw the other side, those who allegedly, by genes, culture, or divine judgment, had more but—as I came to understand—knew less. These people, white people, were living under a lie. More, they were, in some profound way, suffering for the lie. They had seen more of the world than I had—but not more of humanity itself. Most stunningly, I realized that they were deeply ignorant of their own country’s history, and thus they had no intimate sense of how far their country could fall. A system of supremacy justifies itself through illusion, so that those moments when the illusion can no longer hold always come as a great shock.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message