50+ Trevor Noah Quotes And Life Lessons All Kids Should Hear

Trevor Noah is a comedian, actor, writer, and television host from Johannesburg, South Africa.

Hailed as the most flourishing comedian in South Africa, Trevor Noah began his career in 2002. Presently, Trevor is the host of 'The Daily Show', a satirical news program.

Considered as the 'national treasure' by the South Africans, Trevor Noah is one of those rare comedians who talk about delicate subjects like racism. For those who have seen the Trevor Noah Oscars speech during the presentation of the montage for best picture candidate 'Black Panther', he made an inside joke in an African language Xhosa.

Trevor Noah earned immense applause from the South African community for his use of Xhosa at the Oscars in a light-hearted yet satirical way.

We have compiled some of the best Trevor quotes here. With excerpts from 'The Daily Show', Trevor's book, and his comedy bits, these Trevor Noah quotes are a wholesome read!

If you'd like to read more similar articles with quotes, you can check out Inspiring Quotes for Teens and Trent Shelton Quotes.

Trevor Noah 'Born A Crime' Quotes

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Trevor Noah's autobiography, 'Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood', was published in 2006. The book centers around the various incidents that shaped Trevor's childhood and later life as an interracial kid. These Trevor Noah book quotes are truly words of inspiration that everyone must read!

1. "Growing up the way I did, I learned how easy it is for white people to get comfortable with a system that awards them all the perks."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

2. "For my mother. My first fan. Thank you for making me a man."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

3. "In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

4. "If you stop to consider the ramifications, you'll never do anything."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

5. "You cannot blame anyone else for what you do. You cannot blame your past for who you are. You are responsible for you."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

6. "I was wanted. Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

7. "He liked to be liked by the world, which made his abuse even harder to deal with. Because if you think someone is a monster and the whole world says he's a saint, you begin to think that you're the bad person."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

8. "If you spoke to me in Zulu, I replied to you in Zulu. If you spoke to me in Tswana, I replied to you in Tswana. Maybe I didn't look like you, but if I spoke like you, I was you."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

9. "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."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

10. "In America, the dream is to make it out of the ghetto. In Soweto, because there was no leaving the ghetto, the dream was to transform the ghetto."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

11. "Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it's easily tricked."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

12. "A kid cannot dream of being an astronaut if he does not know about space."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

13. "Whilst my mother couldn't give me access to the world, she at least made sure to let me know it existed."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

14. "Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

15. "You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad. Where you either hate them or love them. But that's not how people are."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

16. "We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

17. "Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

Trevor Noah Inspirational Quotes

Here are the best Trevor Noah quotes that are inspirational and heartwarming that'll provide some valuable life lessons.

18. "People are willing to accept you if they see you as an outsider trying to assimilate into their world. But when they see you as a fellow tribe member attempting to disavow the tribe, that is something they will never forgive."

-Trevor Noah.

19. "Language brings with it an identity and a culture, or at least the perception of it. A shared language says 'we're the same.' A language barrier says 'we're different.'"

-Trevor Noah.

20. "Comfort can be dangerous. Comfort provides a floor but also a ceiling."

-Trevor Noah.

21. "Progression, in my opinion, is often identifying shortcomings – whether it's views or the things you're doing in your life, your relationships – and trying to find the places where you improve on those."

-Trevor Noah.

22. "As an outsider myself, I always mixed myself with different groups… I've never been afraid to go into a different space and relate to those people, because I don't have a place where I belong and that means I belong everywhere."

-Trevor Noah.

23. "I've never been afraid to fall in love, nor impatient to find it."

-Trevor Noah.

24. "I always believe that funny is serious and serious is funny. You don't really need a distinction between them."

-Trevor Noah.

25. "If you laugh with somebody, then you know you share something."

-Trevor Noah.

26. "I like the anonymity, the fact that you're a stranger making strangers laugh. You aren't forcing them to laugh - it's involuntary, and that's when they give the most honest response."

-Trevor Noah.

27. "A dog is a great thing for a kid to have. It's like a bicycle but with emotions."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

28. "Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them—and that is what apartheid stole from us: time."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

29. "We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

30. "Comedy is a great tool. We are trying to find ways to use humor to enlighten people without preaching to them."

-Trevor Noah.

31. "Often, people who can do, don't because they're afraid of what people that can't do will say about them doing."

-Trevor Noah.

32. "The way I feel onstage is generally the way the audience is going to feel, because I'm imbuing them with that energy. I want you to feel like I feel, so I need to be in the most comfortable space, where I feel the most intimate with this lens."

-Trevor Noah in a Zoom interview for 'Variety' magazine.

33. "A knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

34. "I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

Trevor Noah Quotes About Race

Trevor Noah was born in South Africa at a time when apartheid was in full swing. These hard-hitting quotes about racism are proof of what life in South Africa in those times was like for Noah and his family.

35. "So many black families spend all of their time trying to fix the problems of the past. That is the curse of being black and poor, and it is a curse that follows you from generation to generation. My mother calls it "the black tax."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

36. "I was born in South Africa during apartheid, a system of laws that made it illegal for people to mix in South Africa. And this was obviously awkward because I grew up in a mixed family. My mother's a black woman, South African Xhosa woman... and my father's Swiss, from Switzerland."

-Trevor Noah.

37. "I think sometimes it's nice to have perspective on these issues, just so that you understand that it's not a unique problem that one country deals with, but rather an idea that society as a whole deals with across borders."

-Trevor Noah in an interview with WBUR.

38. "I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they?"

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

39. "As the outsider, you can retreat into a shell, be anonymous, be invisible. Or you can go the other way. You protect yourself by opening up."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

40. "All nonwhites were systematically classified into various groups and subgroups. Then these groups were given differing levels of rights and privileges in order to keep them at odds."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

41. "You separate people into groups and make them hate one another so you can run them all."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

42. "Try being a white person who adopts the trappings of black culture while still living in the white community. You will face more hate and ridicule and ostracism than you can even begin to fathom."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

43. "The unemployment rate, technically speaking, was 'lower' in South Africa during apartheid, which makes sense. There was slavery—that's how everyone was employed. When democracy came, everyone had to be paid a minimum wage."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

44. "Part of the effort to divide black people was to make sure we were separated not just physically but by language as well."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

45. "Apartheid kept me away from my father because he was white, but for almost all the kids I knew on my grandmother's block in Soweto, apartheid had taken away their fathers as well, just for different reasons."

-Trevor Noah, 'Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood.'

46. "Black people's dogs don't play fetch; you don't throw anything to a black person's dog unless it's food."

-Trevor Noah.

47. "The hood has a gravitational pull. It never leaves you behind, but it also never lets you leave."

-Trevor Noah.

Trevor Noah Funny Quotes

With snippets from 'The Daily Show' and his stand-ups, these funny and witty Trevor Noah quotes capture the distinctive style of Noah's comedy.

48. "The credits from the second 'Godfather' are better than 'Godfather III'."

-Trevor Noah.

49. "If this comedy thing doesn't work out, I've always got poverty to fall back on."

-Trevor Noah.

50. "In life only three things are certain: death, Adobe updates, and taxes."

-Trevor Noah.

51. "I was the first in my family to board an airplane. I was the first in my family to get kicked off an airplane."

-Trevor Noah.

52. "I don't know how to let loose when I'm dancing to the music and the people that made that music are watching me. I've never felt so much pressure in life."

-Trevor Noah.

53. "I'm not a big Hollywood guy. I don't know how the machine works. I leave that to people better than myself."

-Trevor Noah.

Here at Kidadl, we have carefully created lots of interesting family-friendly quotes for everyone to enjoy! If you liked our suggestions for 50+ Trevor Noah Quotes then why not take a look at comedian quotes, or Jimmy Fallon quotes.