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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
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Cornel West
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 2
Actor
Critic
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Tulsa
Oklahoma
Cornel Ronald West
Cornel R. West
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More quotes by Cornel West
To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
Cornel West
Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.
Cornel West
Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.
Cornel West
I was a gangster when I was young. I had a Robin Hood mentality and tended to always want to support the weak against the strong, but sometimes it was cohesive and I really needed to fall in love with the power of education to find the right venue to express my rage. I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes.
Cornel West
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
The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.
Cornel West
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
In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.
Cornel West
We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but Martin Luther King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head.
Cornel West
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
Cornel West
Certainly Martin Luther King, in the mainstream perception of him, had a dream. Yes, he did. But the question becomes, what was that dream? It wasn't the American Dream. It was a dream that all human beings, especially poor and working people, be treated with dignity.
Cornel West
For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice.
Cornel West
The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.
Cornel West
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
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
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
Christians got a lot of work to do. But, the spirit of Dorothy Day is alive. Martin Luther King is still alive. Malcolm X and the prophetic Islamic tradition is still alive. We can't lose sight of those prophetic religious folk who, even given their kin in the same tradition, says, you all are wrong on this, but we're still in the same tradition.
Cornel West
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
I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts.
Cornel West
To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
Cornel West