Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Cornel West - Page 6

I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.

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

The right wing can use anything, and we have to make it very clear and I make it very clear that my love for the president in terms of protecting him and respecting him but also correcting, now all three of those are crucial, and if I can do all three, then the right wing can use it whatever they want, and I'm just clear where I stand, over against them but also critical when the president leans toward the strong, rather than the weak.

Optimism is evidence-based.

Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography.

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.

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.

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

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.

I know my dear brother, President [Barack] Obama, has a bust of Martin King right there in the Oval Office, but the question is are is he going to be true to who that Martin Luther King, Jr., actually is? King was concerned about what? The poor. He was concerned about working people. He was concerned about quality jobs. He was concerned about quality housing. He was concerned about precious babies in Vietnam, the way we ought to be concerned about precious babies in Afghanistan and precious babies in Tel Aviv and precious babies in Gaza.

I do believe that not just the churches but strong communities, strong trade unions, strong families can make a difference in terms of producing persons much more virtuous than what one usually finds in a gangster culture.

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.

And so the question becomes, what you do in the meantime? And you go - if you're forever on the move, especially in the life of the mind; forever reading veraciously, writing, speaking, lecturing, trying to unsettle minds, trying to touch souls, trying to encourage and inspire, on the one hand, but also trying to unhouse and unnerve people, so that they have to reexamine themselves, society and the world on the others. There's tremendous joy in it.

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

The problem is that affirmative action could never really get at the issue of corporate power in the workplace, and so you ended up with the downsizing; you ended up with de-industrializing. You ended up with the marginalizing of working people and working poor people even while affirmative action was taking place, and a new black middle class was expanding.

When black America is on the move, America is on the move.

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.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration... "Joy and Pain" - sit side by side. The blues started off in some field, in some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.

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

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

Some people don't want to be morally consistent. They just want to be tied to their one issue.

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.

There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.

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.

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.

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.

Prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past. In this sense, the praxis of prophetic pragmatism is tragic action with revolutionary intent, usually reformist consequences and always visionary outlook.

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

I want to be a jazzman until the day I die. To help keep that motion, momentum and movement going, for myself, for my students, for the people who hear me. Oh sure, some days you look around at this country and look at the evidence and think, Oh Lord, don't look good. But you keep moving. You gotta keep moving.

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.

The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.

We are intent on building a movement. The next step is grassroots town meetings. We must keep alive the dialogue around the covenants.

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.

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

I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like."

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

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.

There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.

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.

Life is such a mysterious thing that you are up one day; you are down the next day. A lot of the homeless brothers and sisters who were a success ten years ago, they are now on the street. Maybe ten years later they will be a success, but the crucial question is what is the quality of their life.

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.

Truth is fine. Absolutely.

Context shapes who you are.

If you are always trying to do something for a cause bigger than you - connected with serving others - then it is hard to be guilty.

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.

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.

Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don't miss it!

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 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.

I have some notions that have people conceiving of themselves as capable of changing the world. That's why, for me, the issues of self-love, self-respect and self-regard are preconditions for human agency and especially black agency, given the fact that we have been and are such a hated and despised people.

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.

Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.

Any great artist is wrestling with their sadness and loneliness, their fears, anxieties and securities, and they're transfiguring those into complicated forms of expression that affect our hearts, minds and souls and remind us of who we are as human beings, the fragility of our human status and the inevitability of death.

I was blessed to be part of a commercial, pushing for this energy bill, but we've been unsuccessful.

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.

There are different varieties and forms of capitalism. There are priorities within the capitalist society so that you can have countervailing forces come in and empower your working people and your poor people. There are capitalist societies that do not have poverty. America needs to understand that.

Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.

A philosopher's a lover of wisdom.

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?