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Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.

Cornel West

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Cornel West
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 2
Actor
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Tulsa
Oklahoma
Cornel Ronald West
Cornel R. West
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More quotes by Cornel West

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So much has to do with going beyond treating black people as cosmetic and symbolic items, as opposed to genuine personalities and human beings. And that is a deep moral and spiritual issue, which can of course be backed up by Civil Rights Commissions which enforce the laws against any form of discrimination.
Cornel West
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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for non-market values and non-market activity so that love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.
Cornel West
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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
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In the practice of radical love, you are embracing human beings across the board, but you do give a preference - very much like Jesus - to the least of these, to the weak, to the vulnerable. That includes poor whites and poor browns, as well as the poor in black ghettos.
Cornel West
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When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.
Cornel West
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We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.
Cornel West
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Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.
Cornel West
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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
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Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public
Cornel West
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liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.
Cornel West
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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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The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.
Cornel West
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Nobody in my family or in my neighborhood used the language that they used at the University of Chicago. I remember the first time I heard the word value repeated again and again by my professor. Value to me was the price of a frying pan.
Cornel West
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We are a democracy and we don't believe in just hunting down gangsters and killing them. We believe in trying to find the gangsters and bring them back for trial, and give them a trial under rule of law. That's what democracies do.
Cornel West
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All you have is a gift a to give.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.
Cornel West
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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
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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.
Cornel West
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I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.
Cornel West