Cornel West Quotes

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.

Those who came to the United States didn't realize they were white until they got here. They were told they were white. They had to learn they were white. An Irish peasant coming from British imperial abuse in Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s, arrives in the United States. You ask him or her what they are. They say, "I am Irish." No, you're white. "What do you mean, I am white?" And they point me out. "Oh, I see what you mean. This is a strange land."

It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.

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.

Collaborating with the musical genius of our time in some ways with Prince himself - late, great Gerald Levert,all these are forms of singing education, what the Greeks call paideia,that deep education to get us to shift from superficial things to serious things, to shift from bling-bling to life and death to justice and pain and joy, those fundamental, elemental things that we must come to terms with as we make our moves from our mother's womb to the tomb.

Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.

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.

We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.

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.

Black people have been working hard for decades.

In that chocolate side of town, in my blessed city of Sacramento, California - that was beginning of my death shudders, that's why Kierkegaard and Kafka began to make sense to me when I was very, very young - that radical sense fragility of life and inevitability of death; those trucks coming, if the truck came at a same time I was on the bridge, I was in the creek -my body would be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

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

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.

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

You have to have a habitual vision of greatness ... you have to believe in fact that you will refuse to settle for mediocrity. You won't confuse your financial security with your personal integrity, you won't confuse your success with your greatness or your prosperity with your magnanimity ... believe in fact that living is connected to giving.

Most importantly for me growing up, it was a spirituals, it was a gospels, it was James Cleveland, Aretha Franklin, Marion Williams; and then it was Curtis Mayfield - The Main Ingredient, The Whispers, Black Blue Magic, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross - that music helped me preserves my sanity, help me preserve whatever dignity I was able to preserve, helping to keep going. It was a source of tremendous strength in my life.

Rage is fine as long as it doesn't deteriorate into bitterness.

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.

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.

He who learns death unlearns slavery.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.

Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience ... centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. ... The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.

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.

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.

No community dictates to any individual how to live their lives. You can criticize and you can push but people freely choose.

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

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.

We need to put strong Democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people.

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

For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice.

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

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

I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.

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.

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.

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.

The American Dream is individualistic. Martin Luther King's dream was collective. The American Dream says, "I can engage in upward mobility and live the good life." King's dream was fundamentally Christian. His commitment to radical love had everything to do with his commitment to Jesus of Nazareth, and his dream had everything to do with community, with a "we" consciousness that included poor and working people around the world, not just black people.

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. So I come into classroom on fire. I'm on fire for learning. I'm on fire for education, a paideia in the deepest sense of paideia, trying to get young people to shift from the superficial to the substantial, the shift from the bling-bling to letting freedom reign in their minds and hearts and souls.

It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering

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?

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

The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.

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.