Cornel West Quotes

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

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

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.

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

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.

There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one's mind that warrants freedom.

Be willing to learn, because none of us know the truth

I try to, in my own fallible way, speak the truth.

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?

I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.

To be human you must bear witness to justice.

I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else.

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.

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.

Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.

All you have is a gift a to give.

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.

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.

Martin Luther King wanted to be morally consistent and speak out against various things that were wrong, not just racism.

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.

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am.

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.

For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.

It takes unbelievable spiritual courage, moral fortitude, to engage in militant nonviolence.

Martin Luther King's legacy is never to be measured by bricks and mortar, but rather by the kind of lives that we live, and the kind of love and service that we render.

confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness.

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.

The courage to be is the most difficult thing for any human being.

I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts.

Interrogate yours hidden assumptions

One is that I am a regular, everyday person, you know what I mean. I feel that wherever I am, I really am.

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.

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.

I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.

Drew Dellinger is one of the most creative, courageous and prophetic poets of his generation. I love his spirit. Don't miss him!

I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we're true to ourselves.

Hatred of injustice is not the same thing as a love for everyday people.

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.

Anybody who takes Martin Luther King seriously has got to go beyond the standard understanding of who he was, has to connect those dots.

Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward.

You're trying to just leave the world a little better.

You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit.