Top 100 Cornel West Quotes
#1. The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that 'justice is what love looks like in public.' I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.
Naomi Klein
#2. My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.
Rashid Johnson
#3. 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
#4. Humility means two things. One, a capacity for self-criticism. . . . The second feature is allowing others to shine, affirming others, empowering and enabling others." - CORNEL WEST
John C. Maxwell
#5. Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
Cornel West
#6. You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
Cornel West
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.
Cornel West
#12. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.
Cornel West
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.
Cornel West
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.
Cornel West
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
Cornel West
#27. 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
#28. I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism
the idolatry of the 20th century.
Cornel West
#29. 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
#30. As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.
Cornel West
#31. To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
Cornel West
#32. You can't move forward until you look back.
Cornel West
#33. 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
#34. No community dictates to any individual how to live their lives. You can criticize and you can push but people freely choose.
Cornel West
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
Cornel West
#42. 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
#43. It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering
Cornel West
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.
Cornel West
#51. 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
#52. I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.
Cornel West
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. King never confined himself to being solely the leader of black America - even though the white press attempted to do so.
Cornel West
#57. 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
#58. The blues aren't pessimistic. We're prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.
Cornel West
#59. 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
#60. 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
#61. A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.
Cornel West
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed.
Cornel West
#66. Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
Cornel West
#67. I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
Cornel West
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. 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
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#91. A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.
Cornel West
#92. Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.
Cornel West
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. Profound music leads us beyond language ... to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.
Cornel West
#100. Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.
Cornel West
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
