Top 100 Cornel West Quotes

#1. You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #17513
#2. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #81683
#3. 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

Cornel West Quotes #83399
#4. 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

Cornel West Quotes #99632
#5. We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #140773
#6. 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

Cornel West Quotes #149260
#7. Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #161664
#8. 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

Cornel West Quotes #163747
#9. You can't move forward until you look back.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #278277
#10. 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

Cornel West Quotes #280326
#11. There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #335491
#12. 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

Cornel West Quotes #372547
#13. 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

Cornel West Quotes #391044
#14. 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

Cornel West Quotes #432020
#15. I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #439256
#16. 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

Cornel West Quotes #446995
#17. 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

Cornel West Quotes #451154
#18. King never confined himself to being solely the leader of black America - even though the white press attempted to do so.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #459224
#19. We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #566056
#20. 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

Cornel West Quotes #581398
#21. 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

Cornel West Quotes #592198
#22. 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

Cornel West Quotes #619743
#23. 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

Cornel West Quotes #644796
#24. 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

Cornel West Quotes #698167
#25. 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

Cornel West Quotes #706063
#26. 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

Cornel West Quotes #753186
#27. 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

Cornel West Quotes #759812
#28. 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

Cornel West Quotes #762137
#29. 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

Cornel West Quotes #763119
#30. Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #809338
#31. 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

Cornel West Quotes #866129
#32. 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

Cornel West Quotes #905952
#33. 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

Cornel West Quotes #936104
#34. There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #950410
#35. We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #968214
#36. You can't really move forward until you look back.
[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1002218
#37. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1010198
#38. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1048584
#39. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1074081
#40. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1084308
#41. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1084745
#42. You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1090123
#43. Rage is fine as long as it doesn't deteriorate into bitterness.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1096336
#44. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1106812
#45. When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1123991
#46. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1124457
#47. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1167005
#48. To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1203920
#49. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1215248
#50. There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1275407
#51. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1279658
#52. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1321118
#53. If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1340468
#54. I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like."

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1407538
#55. Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1411559
#56. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1412969
#57. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1413468
#58. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1420537
#59. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1428080
#60. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1437327
#61. Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1458362
#62. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1471001
#63. I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1472815
#64. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1476050
#65. For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1478363
#66. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1482275
#67. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1482552
#68. Truth is fine. Absolutely.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1489049
#69. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1489617
#70. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1497112
#71. You're trying to just leave the world a little better.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1503277
#72. There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1506363
#73. I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1520401
#74. Be willing to learn, because none of us know the truth

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1531387
#75. For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it's constitutive of who I am.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1565643
#76. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1565784
#77. If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1576259
#78. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1577081
#79. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1621806
#80. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1632909
#81. Optimism is evidence-based.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1641291
#82. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1641433
#83. White supremacy is so deep-seated that it's hard to see it eliminated. But we could definitely push it back.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1653428
#84. Context shapes who you are.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1682898
#85. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1689049
#86. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1694635
#87. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1767164
#88. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1770332
#89. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1771677
#90. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1779322
#91. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1802053
#92. We need to put strong Democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1802958
#93. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1806013
#94. Hatred of injustice is not the same thing as a love for everyday people.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1807220
#95. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1831058
#96. I try to, in my own fallible way, speak the truth.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1831956
#97. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1832263
#98. Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1835884
#99. 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

Cornel West Quotes #1859772
#100. The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence.

Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes #1873806

Famous Authors

Popular Topics

Scroll to Top