Trevor Noah Quotes

Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling.

None of them had cars, either. There was no future in which most of these families would ever have cars. There was maybe one car for every thousand people, yet almost everyone had a driveway. It was almost like building the driveway was a way of willing the car to happen. The story of Soweto is the story of the driveways. It’s a hopeful place.

Learn from your past and be better because of your past,” she would say, “but don’t cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it. Don’t be bitter.” And she never was.

[A friend] said to me, he said "You know, Trevor, one of the greatest lies they tell you in America, they tell you that-- they tell you that America is two political parties -- Republicans and Democrats", and he said, "But I'll tell you now, it's Republicans, Democrats, and it's black people and every other person of color who's trying to make a name or do something for themselves." And that stuck with me, and it made me think about American politics differently. Made me realize that we get tricked a lot of the time -- not just in America, but everywhere in the world -- into liking or not liking something based more on the tribe that it comes from, the tribe that it emanates from, than what the idea actually is.

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.

Race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason. Humans being humans, and sex being sex, that prohibition never stopped anyone. There were mixed kids in south Africa 9 months after the first Dutch boats hit the beach at Table Bay.

There’s probably a goat hanging around — there’s always a goat.

Laughter is strange in that if we think of all the emotions that we're able to express or feel, one of the things about laughter that's particularly interesting to me is it's one of the few emotions that robs your pain of its power.

This is what I find interesting, is, like, when I read stories from Africa and when I watch what politicians say, especially in France, about African migrants: When they are unemployed, when they may commit a crime or when they're considered unsavory, it's the African immigrants. When their children go on to provide a world cup victory for France, we should only refer to them as French.

It's easy to be judgmental about crime when you live in a world wealthy enough to be removed from it. But the hood taught me that everyone has different notions of right and wrong, different definitions of what constitutes crime, and what level of crime they're willing to participate in. If a crackhead comes through and he's got a crate of Corn Flakes boxes he's stolen out of the back of a supermarket, the poor mom isn't thinking, 'I'm aiding and abetting a criminal by buying these Corn Flakes.' No. She's thinking, 'My family needs food and this guy has Corn Flakes', and she buys the Corn Flakes.

If you think too much about the ass-kicking your mom gave you, or the ass-kicking that life gave you, you’ll stop pushing the boundaries and breaking the rules. It’s better to take it, spend some time crying, then wake up the next day and move on. You’ll have a few bruises and they’ll remind you of what happened and that’s okay. But after a while the bruises fade, and they fade for a reason — because now it’s time to get up to some shit again.

It's a powerful experience, shitting. There's something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don't care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyonce shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All of that goes away. You are never more yourself than when you're taking a shit. You have that moment where you realize, 'This is me. This is who I am.

Catholic school is similar to apartheid in that it’s ruthlessly authoritarian, and its authority rests on a bunch of rules that don’t make any sense.

You cannot blame anyone else for What you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you. You make your own choices.

The hood has a gravitational pull. It never leaves you behind, but it also never lets you leave. Because by making the choice to leave, you’re insulting the place that raised you and made you and never turned you away.