Top 376 Quotes & Sayings by Cornel West - Page 2

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.

Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.

It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.

You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.

When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain.

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.

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.

Market moralities and mentalities-- fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost-- yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation.

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.

Justice is what love looks like in public.

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.

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.

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

To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love.

The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.

To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.

Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity.

We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.

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.

The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.

Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.

If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.

One of the things I love most about Martin Luther King is that he was willing to sacrifice his popularity in favor of his integrity. He was an honest man, and he would tell the truth.

To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.

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.

A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.

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

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

I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.

The love of wisdom is a way of life; that is to say, it's a set of practices that have to do with mustering the courage to think critically about ourselves, society, and the world; mustering the courage to empathize; the courage, I would say, to love; the courage to have compassion with others, especially the widow and the orphan, the fatherless and the motherless, poor and working peoples, gays and lesbians, and so forth - and the courage to hope.

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.

I don't draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can't stand white supremacy. I can't stand male supremacy. I can't stand imperial subjugation. I can't stand homophobia.

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)

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?

Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.

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.

A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.

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.

Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope.

The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high - and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find.

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.

You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself.

There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.

If you've got on the one hand death, dogmatism, domination, and on the other you've got desire in the face of death, dialogue in the face of dogmatism, democracy in the face of domination, then philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy, trying to keep alive a very fragile democratic experiment.

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.

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.

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

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.

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.

I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism--the idolatry of the 20th century.

To be human you must bear witness to justice.

You keep folks so intimidated. You can give them money, access, but they're still scared. And as long as you're scared, you're on the plantation.

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.

I want to learn something from my atheistic brothers and sisters, even though I'm a Christian. I want to learn something from my right-wing brothers and sisters, even though I'm a progressive. I want to learn something from the elderly, even though I'm middle-aged or tilting toward the elderly. I want to learn especially something from the youth. That's why I spend a lot of time in hip-hop studios.

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.

You can't move forward until you look back.

It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.

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

You don't begin by dehumanizing those who are dehumanizing you, because it contributes to the cycle of dehumanization in the world.