Trevor Noah Quotes

People in apartheid South Africa can tell you that God cursed black people when they cursed Him. And so the hermetic people were condemned to be drawers of water and of wood.

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

The only time the white man is brotherly toward you is when he can use you, when he can exploit you, when he will oppress you, when you will submit to him.

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

Mumbling obeisance to abhorrence of apartheid is like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

The issue of racism and racial prejudice. It is very, very difficult to discuss. It is difficult to discuss the issue of apartheid. Many have made the observation that it is very difficult to find anyone in SA who ever supported apartheid because everyone was opposed, it was against our will and so on.

The Republican Party, in many ways, grew up as a reaction to that [ segregation], and a lot of people have misunderstood that.

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

You can tell this by the program the federal government had to train 2,400 tractor drivers. They would have trained Negro and white together, but this man, Congressman Jamie Whitten, voted against it and everything that was decent. So, we've got to have somebody in Washington who is concerned about the people of Mississippi.

I know that in South Africa, we were in that space, and we're still suffering from that space. And that was where a government very successfully convinced the majority of a population that every single person there was blocking the other people from achieving greatness in the country, only to realize that we were all being oppressed at the same time. That's one of the biggest things. And I'm proud to say that.

There was always resistance and there was always a counter-narrative, but we were told all through the early twentieth century that black people in the South don't want an education, they don't want to vote, they're simple people, they don't want this, they don't want that.

Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

They don't let many black people in the governor's mansion in Alabama, unless they're cleaning.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

It would be the easiest thing in the world for the white man to destroy all Black Muslims.

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

If you sit down and talk to a person, it's easy to convince him that apartheid can never save a country and will lead to the slaughtering of innocent people - including his own people.

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.

Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery . . . is his natural and normal condition.

I don't even remember hearing about [Immorality Act of 1927]. I just knew about it. I was born into it, so I don't remember my parents ever saying it to me. I don't remember a conversation ever being had around this. I just knew this to be the law because that's what I was growing up in during that time in South Africa.

Of all forms of slavery there is none that is so harmful and degrading as that form of slavery which tempts one human being to hate another by reason of his race or color. One man cannot hold another man down in the ditch without remaining down in the ditch with him.

With black people, there are 50 Hitlers over the course of history.

We are extricating ourselves from a system that insulted our common humanity by dividing us from one another on the basis of race and setting us against each other as oppressed and oppressor. That system committed a crime against humanity.