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 CoatesRead
I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you're swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.
Interpretation
Life is constantly changing and presenting new challenges, making it difficult to fully master it.
In this quote, Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on the complexity and unpredictability of life. He suggests that just when one feels they have a grasp on their current circumstances, new challenges emerge that require a reevaluation of their understanding and approach. This highlights the inevitability of change and the need for resilience in navigating life's uncertainties.
In practice
During a motivational speech about overcoming adversity.
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.
We've got in the habit of not really understanding how freedom was in the 19th century, the idea of government of the people in the 19th century. America commits itself to that in theory.
I never expected my writing to become as popular as it did.
It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.
If I could have anything - you know, and this is across the board for any presidential candidate - I would have a greater acknowledgment of history in our policy and in our affairs.
You can't make a direct comparison between middle-class African Americans and middle-class white Americans, affluent African Americans and affluent white Americans. The amount of wealth tends to be less.
Consequently, if the republic is the weal of the people, and there is no people if it be not associated by a common acknowledgment of right, and if there is no right where there is no justice, then most certainly it follows that there is no republic where there is no justice.
I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.
Money motivates neither the best people, nor the best in people. It can move the body and influence the mind, but it cannot touch the heart or move the spirit; that is reserved for belief, principle, and morality.
We could not guard every water pipeline from being blown up and every tree from being uprooted. We could not prevent every murder of a worker in an orchard or a family in their beds. But it was in our power to set high price for our blood, a price too high for the Arab community, the Arab army, or the Arab governments to think it worth paying... It was in our power to cause the Arab governments to renounce 'the policy of strength' toward Israel by turning it into a demonstration of weakness.
Our judgements of good and evil ... presuppose God as the standard. If there's no God, there's neither good nor evil. There's just nature doing what it does
The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own.
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