Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by Cornel West, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring Cornel West quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 263 Cornel West quotes for you to read and share.

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Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists. -- Cornel West
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We need serious strategic and tactical thinking about how to create new models of leadership and forge the kind of persons to actualize these models. -- Cornel West
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Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice. -- Cornel West
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My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. -- Cornel West
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If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf. -- Cornel West
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You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly. -- Cornel West
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I'm black, so, you know, I'm again with black folk, but it's a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices. -- Cornel West
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Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity. -- Cornel West
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He who learns death unlearns slavery. -- Cornel West
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I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling. -- Cornel West
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Profound music leads us beyond language ... to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence. -- Cornel West
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And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you. -- Cornel West
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If the churches don't move, much of the community won't move. We've got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors. -- Cornel West
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It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands. -- Cornel West
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You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit. -- Cornel West
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Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature. -- Cornel West
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American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows. -- Cornel West
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Part of the problem is we had so far to go, given the deep homophobia in our society. But, the movement is very real. The movement is very real. -- Cornel West
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Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It's a form of spiritual emptiness. -- Cornel West
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It is very difficult to sustain a high-quality relationship that has the kind of mutual intensity, that has a kind of mutual respect, without putting in time. -- Cornel West
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I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay. -- Cornel West
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There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives. -- Cornel West
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It's just that the churches have been sleeping for a long time. A lot of people argue that the churches are even dead. I don't believe they're dead, but they've been sleeping, but they, I hope, will wake up, and that's one of my tasks is to make sure they wake up as much as they do before I die. -- Cornel West
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To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies. -- Cornel West
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Truth is fine. Absolutely. -- Cornel West
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This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney Hook is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America. -- Cornel West
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We're talking about a prison-industrial complex. We're talking about a war on drugs that's generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We're talking about dilapidated housing. We're talking about joblessness and underemployment. -- Cornel West
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To be humble is to be so sure of one's self and one's mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one's self and status. -- Cornel West
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Hey, you got something going here. I think we've got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people. -- Cornel West
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Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop. -- Cornel West
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I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys. -- Cornel West
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There are various forms of weaponry, intellectual weaponry, spiritual weaponry, political weaponry, economic weaponry. Because we are on the battlefield, and there are bullets flying, some symbolic, some literal and the life of the mind is a crucial place where the battle goes on. -- Cornel West
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Martin King was fundamentally committed to the least of these [poor, working people]. Of course, he was a Christian soldier for justice from the 25th chapter of Matthew. -- Cornel West
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Part of the challenge of the Barack Obama campaign was to try to neutralize that white backlash, and of course, he was masterful in doing that. -- Cornel West
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I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it's a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver's seat regarding their lives. -- Cornel West
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I certainly support the right of the gay brothers and sisters to come together. I believe true love can take a number of different forms. If they choose to be married that's fine, but the important thing is I hope they find love -- Cornel West
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Hatred of injustice is not the same thing as a love for everyday people. -- Cornel West
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The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice. -- Cornel West
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I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That's why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don't get out of hand. -- Cornel West
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Poor people can be greedy, too. It's just that they don't have any material resources. We need shaping of the souls as well as shaping of our institutions. -- Cornel West
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No community dictates to any individual how to live their lives. You can criticize and you can push but people freely choose. -- Cornel West
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The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper. -- Cornel West
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Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something. -- Cornel West
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Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle. -- Cornel West
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There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely. -- Cornel West
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We're beings towards death, we're featherless two-legged linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us. -- Cornel West
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We're beings toward death, we're ... two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. -- Cornel West
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The evil is so ubiquitous in terms of objectification of all of us, that one can say that almost about any TV and even radio show. -- Cornel West
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It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering -- Cornel West
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Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don't miss it! -- Cornel West
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I have a whole lot of fun in trying to serve others and just keeping it funky, trying to keep it real, trying to ensure that we are able to be ourselves and get beyond these deodorized discourses and deodorized spaces that put on masks. -- Cornel West
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I think those who choose to find joy in serving others, those who choose to find their voice, to pursue their vocation and to act on their vision oftentimes have to sacrifice much.It's almost like a crucifixion in terms of the cross you have to bear. -- Cornel West
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Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, a whole host of brilliant, courageous critics say all kinds of things, and he [Barack Obama] treats them with respect. They get invited to the White House. I say the same thing, he talks to me like I'm a Cub Scout. -- Cornel West
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The aim is not for me to be right. The aim is to make sure that we keep the focus on the people who are suffering. That's what we're here for. -- Cornel West
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I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth. -- Cornel West
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Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we're true to ourselves. -- Cornel West
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I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire. -- Cornel West
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I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it. -- Cornel West
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Philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia; that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom. -- Cornel West
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You can't really move forward until you look back.
[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University] -- Cornel West
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Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That's true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future. -- Cornel West
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I would say you have to fight in the life of the mind as well as fight in the streets, as well as fight in the courts, as well as fight in congress and the White House. Every site is a sight of contestation. -- Cornel West
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The capitalist culture of consumption ... does not provide meaningful sustenance for large numbers of people. -- Cornel West
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Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal. -- Cornel West
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We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness. -- Cornel West
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Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content. -- Cornel West
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The black church is dormant, much of the community is dormant. If the black church is leaning toward the right, much of the community is leaning toward the right. If it is leaning in the left wing direction having repercussions. -- Cornel West
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The interesting thing for me is, if that had been a left-wing person raising questions, [President Obama] probably would have expressed his anger. Because Obama really does get upset about progressives. -- Cornel West
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It would just be nice if we had leaders in Washington who could unequivocally take a stand on behalf of democratic movements in other parts of the world. And even this is true for even Brother Barack Obama. -- Cornel West
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There's a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde. -- Cornel West
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We are intent on building a movement. The next step is grassroots town meetings. We must keep alive the dialogue around the covenants. -- Cornel West
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Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven. -- Cornel West
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It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're reading in the library, at home and so on, but you're intensely alive. In fact you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all. -- Cornel West
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Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street. -- Cornel West
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White supremacy is so deep-seated that it's hard to see it eliminated. But we could definitely push it back. -- Cornel West
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There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that. -- Cornel West
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If you can't have a good time and smile and relate to people across race and class, then the success that you have ultimately is just sounding brass and tinkling symbol. -- Cornel West
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I think, Tom Friedman is right, and I think that we have to - we have to have a serious public dialogue to try to shift public policy in that regard. -- Cornel West
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I'm sure I've had my phone tapped for years, I don't think it's a crime against humanity they just ought to quit doing it, god damn it. -- Cornel West
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Homophobia is very, very difficult to root out, to extricate. That's why we have to bear witness. That's why we have to be so public about it, and that's why we can't just play footsie with it. -- Cornel West
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I try to, in my own fallible way, speak the truth. -- Cornel West
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The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices. -- Cornel West
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I am not optimistic, but I've never been optimistic about humankind or America. The evidence never looks good in terms of forces for good actually becoming prominent. -- Cornel West
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Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination. -- Cornel West
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I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I've never viewed them in any way as being separable. -- Cornel West
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The wonderful thing about the black church for me is that it forces you to come to terms with the centrality of love in the world. -- Cornel West
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It's so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that's what is dangerous. -- Cornel West
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I think we must never, ever demonize one another. That's true not just black people to black people; that's human being to human being. -- Cornel West
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There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three. -- Cornel West
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We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence. -- Cornel West
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Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth. -- Cornel West
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I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural. -- Cornel West
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Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land. -- Cornel West
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If our world is regulated by reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of Darwin; or reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of religious dogma; you end up being childishly anti-scientific, and childishly anti-religious, and you miss the very complex interaction [they share] -- Cornel West
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You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth -- Cornel West
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Why I can't stand this phrase about I don't have any permanent enemies, any permanent friends, only permanent interests. I can't stand that. It's a matter of principles. What kind of integrity, what kind of morality do you have? -- Cornel West
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The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they're on the road to freedom and that means they're gonna run up against the powers that be. -- Cornel West
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For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites ... -- Cornel West
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In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme.
Aristotle -- Cornel West
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You're going to end up with a government in Egypt that is concerned about the precious Palestinians, the same way we ought to be concerned about both precious Palestinians and precious Jews. -- Cornel West
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The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It's been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it's been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it. -- Cornel West
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I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil. -- Cornel West
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When it comes to our precious poor children of all colors, maybe disproportionally in percentage black and white and red, but all colors, yellow as well as white, we need to push toward integrated schools. -- Cornel West
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We look at the legacy of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker, Malcolm X and Martin King. We have, and part of the struggle now in the age of [Barack] Obama is how do we keep alive the legacy of Martin King? -- Cornel West
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The important thing for me as an educator is how to - how do we unsettle the minds and touch the souls of significant numbers of young people who don't read texts or don't read my texts. -- Cornel West
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The rage is still there but I found the right kind of channel, because it's tied to a love, it's tied to a struggle for justice. And most importantly, for me, it's tied to a recognition that I am a cracked vessel. -- Cornel West
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We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters. -- Cornel West
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We're learning lessons from Africa. And the lesson that we need to learn is, how do we straighten our backs up in the face of these oligarchs and plutocrats who are trying to snatch the best of our democracy away? -- Cornel West
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We are a democracy and we don't believe in just hunting down gangsters and killing them. We believe in trying to find the gangsters and bring them back for trial, and give them a trial under rule of law. That's what democracies do. -- Cornel West
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So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex. -- Cornel West
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The women can always choose the patriarchal models, and you end up with a Margaret Thatcher. -- Cornel West
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There is no organizations and institutions that are worthwhile in terms of fighting for and dying for unless there is some individual integrity and character and virtue that is at work within various individuals in those institutions especially their leaders. -- Cornel West
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Prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past. In this sense, the praxis of prophetic pragmatism is tragic action with revolutionary intent, usually reformist consequences and always visionary outlook. -- Cornel West
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If they think they have issues with the president not doing enough for the poor now, wait and see what happens if the opposition takes office. Then they would really need a poverty tour. -- Cornel West
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When you love poor people THAT MUCH, when you love 'working people' THAT MUCH, that makes you the freest man/woman in the country.
- Cornel West in explaining that Obama is A fulfillment of MLK's dream not THE fulfillment of MLK's dream -- Cornel West
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We need to put strong Democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people. -- Cornel West
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You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it. -- Cornel West
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A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. -- Cornel West
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I think anytime we talk about transforming in capitalist society, we are talking about a process not a particular event so you can't talk about a socialist revolution. -- Cornel West
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The black agenda, from Frederick Douglas to Ida B. Wells to Martin King, has always been the most broad, deep, inclusive, embracing agenda of the nation. -- Cornel West
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The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people. -- Cornel West
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Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope. -- Cornel West
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That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with. -- Cornel West
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Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it. -- Cornel West
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There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference. -- Cornel West
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Our politicians have sacrificed their principles on the altar of special interests; our corporate leaders have sacrificed their integrity on the altar of profits; and our media watchdogs have sacrificed the voice of dissent on the altar of audience competition. -- Cornel West
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There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one's mind that warrants freedom. -- Cornel West
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What I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas. -- Cornel West
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Greatness is telling the truth & being courageous in pursuit of justice. The worst thing you could tell young people is to be successful but become well-adjusted to an unjust status quo as opposed to being great & being maladjusted to an unjust status quo. -- Cornel West
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To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. -- Cornel West
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I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse. -- Cornel West
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Michael Jackson was part of that tremendous wave in the ocean of human expression and it happened to be located first and foremost in Gary, Indiana, working class. -- Cornel West
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I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism
the idolatry of the 20th century. -- Cornel West
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I think hip-hop can be prophetic and progressive, and at the same time, the dominant forms tend to be homophobic, misogynistic and something that we need to critically call into question. -- Cornel West
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The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people. -- Cornel West
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We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics. -- Cornel West
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The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them. -- Cornel West
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This is what it is for Asians to be part of - support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it's a matter of justice. -- Cornel West
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Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one's feelings of self-worth and one's capacity to be a political agent. -- Cornel West
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A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all. -- Cornel West
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To be human you must bear witness to justice. -- Cornel West
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To me, healing means you have to recognize there is a wound and you try to understand what the sources of the wound are, which means you try to tell a story about how it came to be. So you have to engage in some historical interpretation. -- Cornel West
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It's true that in reading an interview, I have a little critique of the objectification of women in a [Playboy] magazine that is perceived to doing that. -- Cornel West
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The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive. -- Cornel West
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The blues aren't pessimistic. We're prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark. -- Cornel West
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I just don't want the fear from the right to be used by the [Barack] Obama administration to silence critics. We have to be willing to tell the truth because we're trying to speak about conditions that are being rendered invisible in our prisons and schools in the hood and so forth and so on. -- Cornel West
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For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms. -- Cornel West
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A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue. -- Cornel West
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If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go. -- Cornel West
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Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102) -- Cornel West
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Drew Dellinger is one of the most creative, courageous and prophetic poets of his generation. I love his spirit. Don't miss him! -- Cornel West
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It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself. -- Cornel West
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When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself. -- Cornel West
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I don't draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can't stand white supremacy. I can't stand male supremacy. I can't stand imperial subjugation. I can't stand homophobia. -- Cornel West
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We are who we are because somebody loved us. -- Cornel West
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I was blessed to be part of a commercial, pushing for this energy bill, but we've been unsuccessful. -- Cornel West
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Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love. -- Cornel West
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The courage to be is the most difficult thing for any human being. -- Cornel West
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Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"
they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108) -- Cornel West
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I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts. -- Cornel West
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I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes. It could be homophobia, it could be white supremacy, male supremacy, imperial arrogance, class subordination or whatever. -- Cornel West
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Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus - yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle. -- Cornel West
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When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That's not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important. -- Cornel West
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We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions. -- Cornel West
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You work through race, you don't deny race. It's the difference between being color-blind and love-struck. You see, if I love you, I don't need to eliminate your whiteness. If you love me, you don't need to eliminate my blackness. You embrace humanity. -- Cornel West
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I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else. -- Cornel West
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Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher - for any human being, I think, in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope. -- Cornel West
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I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness. -- Cornel West
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You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good. -- Cornel West
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It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success. -- Cornel West
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I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered. -- Cornel West
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I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope. -- Cornel West
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Where there is no vital community to hold up precious ethical and religious ideals, there can be no coming to a moral commitment - only personal accomplishment is applauded. -- Cornel West
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Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways. -- Cornel West
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The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace. -- Cornel West
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We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice. -- Cornel West
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You can't move forward until you look back. -- Cornel West
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For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am. -- Cornel West
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I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort. -- Cornel West
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You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself. -- Cornel West
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We must not allow our elected officials -many beholden to unaccountable corporate elites- to bastardize and pulverize the precious word democracy as they fail to respect and act on genuine democratic ideals -- Cornel West
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To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. -- Cornel West
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I do believe that not just the churches but strong communities, strong trade unions, strong families can make a difference in terms of producing persons much more virtuous than what one usually finds in a gangster culture. -- Cornel West
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Success is such a relative thing for me. I'm fundamentally a Christian which means that ultimately all of the penultimate titles and things you just had to wear with a loose garment. Really. -- Cornel West
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We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes. -- Cornel West
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I think that when we talk about education I was also blessed to talk with my dear brother Arne Duncan. I had never met him, the secretary of Education. We had a wonderful talk. And I had told him quite explicitly education is a right, it's not a race to the top. -- Cornel West
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I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South. -- Cornel West
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When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period. -- Cornel West
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Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is. -- Cornel West
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You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust. -- Cornel West
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Part of the popularity with Louis Farrakhan has less to do with the content of his message and more to do with the form that he portrays himself - as being a free, black person who speaks what is on his mind with boldness and fearlessness. Who is willing to pay the consequences. -- Cornel West
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We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people. -- Cornel West
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We've got the wrong vision, the wrong values, the wrong priority, and as the great prophetic figure Marian Edelman Wright puts it, we have been AWOL when it comes to poor people and poor children. -- Cornel West
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It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love. -- Cornel West
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None of us alone can save the nation or the world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so. (p. 109) -- Cornel West
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Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense. -- Cornel West
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I couldn't live without the genius of Stephen Sondheim, be it not just West Side Story,but Follies,Company,Sweeney Todd,Passion.You can go on and on. -- Cornel West
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I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualitative difference. -- Cornel West
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If we can't get back to principles and integrity and it's reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble. -- Cornel West
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The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom. -- Cornel West
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You've got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you'll be able to love others. -- Cornel West
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Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. -- Cornel West
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Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent. -- Cornel West
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We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed. -- Cornel West
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We have to be self-critical even in context that we might be critical of, even as we - our pieces appear in it. -- Cornel West
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King never confined himself to being solely the leader of black America - even though the white press attempted to do so. -- Cornel West
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Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. -- Cornel West
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One is that I am a regular, everyday person, you know what I mean. I feel that wherever I am, I really am. -- Cornel West
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As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear. -- Cornel West
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Barack Obama has domesticated the left in such a way that we feel as if we have no alternative but him ... I refuse to accept that. -- Cornel West
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I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure and orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place, televisual pleasure has its place [in life]. -- Cornel West
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There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie. -- Cornel West
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Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of. -- Cornel West
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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak. -- Cornel West
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To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all. -- Cornel West
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Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope. -- Cornel West
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Liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms. -- Cornel West
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You're trying to just leave the world a little better. -- Cornel West
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Confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder -- Cornel West
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John Coltrane was an addict; Billie Holiday was an addict; Eugene O'Neill was an addict. What would America be without addicts and post-addicts who make such grand contributions to our society? -- Cornel West
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Context shapes who you are. -- Cornel West
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There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility. -- Cornel West
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The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence. -- Cornel West
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The problem is we need much more moral content. -- Cornel West
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Black people have been working hard for decades. -- Cornel West
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Life is such a mysterious thing that you are up one day; you are down the next day. A lot of the homeless brothers and sisters who were a success ten years ago, they are now on the street. Maybe ten years later they will be a success, but the crucial question is what is the quality of their life. -- Cornel West
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We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity. -- Cornel West
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For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice. -- Cornel West
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When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain. -- Cornel West
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Be willing to learn, because none of us know the truth -- Cornel West
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I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions. -- Cornel West
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Optimism is evidence-based. -- Cornel West
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Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics? -- Cornel West
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When black America is on the move, America is on the move. -- Cornel West
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Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary. -- Cornel West
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Frederick Douglas's agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it's spilt over for women's rights; it's split over for worker's rights and so forth. -- Cornel West
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All you have is a gift a to give. -- Cornel West
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As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. -- Cornel West
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There used to be corporations that produced products. Now there are just banks that produce deals, hedge-fund-driven banks and derivatives and those things. -- Cornel West
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Being a Christian is not a political orientation for the president, but he is a centrist. -- Cornel West
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Going all the way back to Jeremiah Wright and Tavis Smiley and Van Jones and even Shirley Sherrod and maybe even Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel. We're going to see what his [Barack Obama] response is. -- Cornel West
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The legacy of [Martin Luther] King is the very thing that must be expanded if America is to be free and democratic in the 21st century. It's just as simple as that. -- Cornel West
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I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against. -- Cornel West
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A philosopher's a lover of wisdom. -- Cornel West
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Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth. -- Cornel West
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Education is soul crafting. -- Cornel West
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I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft. -- Cornel West
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And as a Christian, I got something the world didn't give me, the world can't take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything. -- Cornel West
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We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good. -- Cornel West
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Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well. -- Cornel West
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Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward. -- Cornel West
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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property. -- Cornel West
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The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states. -- Cornel West
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When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up. -- Cornel West
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We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail. -- Cornel West
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Rage is fine as long as it doesn't deteriorate into bitterness. -- Cornel West
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For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo. -- Cornel West
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There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There's a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas. -- Cornel West
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To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love. -- Cornel West
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You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people. -- Cornel West
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There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. -- Cornel West
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I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like." -- Cornel West
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The powerful have no monopoly on greed, hatred, fear, or ignorance. -- Cornel West