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Born A Crime Stories from a South African Childhood / Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race / Natives Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire

Trevor Noah

Top 10 Best Quotes

“We spent so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear the most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to. "What if..." "If only.." "I wonder what would have..." You will never, never know, and it will haunt you for the rest of your days.”

“You do not own the thing that you love”

“You can only dream of what you can imagine.”

“Where most children are proof of their parents love, I was a proof of their criminality”

“Where most children are proof of their parents love, I I was a proof of their criminality”

“There was no subject too dark or too painful for her to tackle with humour.”

“The person had to fall. Because if he didn't fall that meant the demon was powerful and the pastor needed to come at him even harder. You could be a linebacker in the NFL. Didn't matter. That pastor was taking you down. Good Lord, that was fun.”

“Remember a man is not determined by how much he earns. Being a man is not what you have, it’s who you are. Being more of a man doesn’t mean a woman has to be less than you. Make sure your woman is the woman in your life. Don’t be one of these men who makes his wife compete with his mother. A man with a wife cannot be beholden to his mother”

“My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life was that no one showed her. No one chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will.”

“In society, we do horrible things to one another because we don't see the person it affects. We don't see their face. We don't see them as people. Which was the whole reason the hood was built in the first place, to keep the victims of apartheid out of sight and out of mind. Because if white people saw black people as humans, they would see that slavery is unconscionable. We live in a world where we don't see the ramifications of what we do to others, because we don't live with them. It would be a whole lot harder for an investment banker to rip off people with subprime mortgages if he actually had to live with the people he was ripping off. If we could see one another's pain and empathize with one another, it would never be worth it to us to commit the crimes in the first place.”

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Book Keywords:

life-lessons, the-second-girl, inspirational-attitude, religious-humor, humor, humour, life-philosophy

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