Cornel West Quotes

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.

To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.

A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.

Philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia; that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom.

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.

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.

I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.

It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love.

Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.

When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.

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.

Martin Luther King was a victim of surveillance, and had great solidarity with victims of surveillance.

As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.

The powerful have no monopoly on greed, hatred, fear, or ignorance.

You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself.

Wealth inequality has increased.

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.

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak - that gives it an existential emphasis.

The capitalist culture of consumption... does not provide meaningful sustenance for large numbers of people.

We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.

Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

He who learns death unlearns slavery.

Being a Christian is not a political orientation for the president, but he is a centrist.

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.

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.

Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.

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.

Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.

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.

Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.

There's a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The women can always choose the patriarchal models, and you end up with a Margaret Thatcher.

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.

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.

All individuals have the same value, not to be determined by market price. They're made in the image and likeness of God.

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.

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.

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.

I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.

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.

When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

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.

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.

I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.