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" I haven't checked, but I highly suspect that chickens evolved from an egg-laying ancestor, which would mean that there were, in fact, eggs before there were chickens. Genius. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Eggs
Were
Mean
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" There's a kind of optimism specifically within Christianity about the world - about whose side God is on. Well, I didn't have any of that in my background. I had physicality and chaos. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
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World
Side
" I don't completely understand why people in Aspen want to hear what I have to say. "
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Hear
Want
Why
" I'm a writer. My job is to speak what - that which I think is true. If that bridges the gap, that's good. If it doesn't, that's too bad. "
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" You may not be able to change the course of government, but you can achieve some peace. And books were the path to that. I grew up in a house where books were everywhere. "
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Peace
Path
" Black people are pledging their fealty to the state, and yet they aren't getting the same return. This is theft. It's systemized. "
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Theft
Same
Return
" 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. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Connect
Best
Imagination
" With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Skin
Poverty
America
" My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.' "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
College
Writer
Mind
" To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Black
Before
Naked
" Amiri Baraka went to Howard. Lucille Clifton went to Howard. Ossie Davis went to Howard. And I was aware of that when I was there. Charles Drew went to Howard. Thurgood Marshall went to the law school. Being aware of that and having all of that brought to bear, again, it's one of those things that I can't really separate from my career as a writer. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Bear
Career
Law
" I think it's really important to be conscious of yourself and the world around you. For me, that meant reading a lot and reporting. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Me
Yourself
Reading
" The soul is part of the body. The mind is part of the body. When folks do physical violence to black people, to black bodies in this country, the soul as we construe it is damaged, too - the mind is damaged, too. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Mind
Body
People
" When people who are not black are interested in what I do, frankly, I'm always surprised. I don't know if it's my low expectations for white people or what. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Know
Expectations
Black
" I have never read 'To Kill A Mockingbird.' "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Mockingbird
Read
Never
" One of the things we tell ourselves as African-Americans is if we work hard, play by the rules, we do start back a little ways, but if we can be twice as good, somehow we can escape history and heritage and legacy. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Work Hard
Good
History
" The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
American
Her
Proud
" Abraham Lincoln was killed by the forces of white supremacy. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Forces
Abraham
White
" My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Look
World
Write
" The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Violence
Relationship
People
" Donald Trump begins his political career in birtherism. That idea is connected to a very, very old notion that African-Americans are not citizens. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Political
Career
Connected
" The FHA literally drew up the redlining map and then basically distributed - I'm sorry, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation actually did it, and then distributed to banks who used that as policy to determine how they would lend and who they would lend to. The racism in the system was pervasive and total. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Racism
Home
System
" If I wrote a Jewish superhero, he'd have awesome time-traveling powers. I'd call him Doctorow. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Call
Superhero
Jewish
" There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Going
Will
Fear
" The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
You
Terrorism
Road
" One can say Senator Sanders should have more explicit antiracist policy within his racial justice platform, not just more general stuff, and still cast a vote for Senator Sanders and still feel that Senator Sanders is the best option that we have in the race. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Vote
Race
Justice
" I would say as a journalist, I would envision travelling to other countries that have had to reckon with their past and see how they've done it: what worked, what didn't work, finding characters that would tell the story of how that process was done. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Finding
Past
Process
" We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Country
Racism
Long
" In the 1930s and the 1940s, we set up the FHA. We set up the Home Owners' Loan Corporation. We set up specific bureaus to make our communities look the way they look. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Home
Up
Loan
" Long view of history shows evil triumphing more often than we'd like to admit. That's just how it is. I don't despair too much about dying, either. It's just a fact of being human. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
View
Admit
Dying
" I think the body is the ultimate thing. The soul and mind are part of the body. I don't think there is anything outside of that. Your physical self is who you are. Some people feel that that is reductionist, but I don't think it is. It's just true. "
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Soul
Think
Body