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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
Critic
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Tulsa
Oklahoma
Cornel Ronald West
Cornel R. West
Something
Upon
Willpower
Way
Hope
Bravery
People
Action
Empathy
Others
Activity
Matter
Compassion
Enough
Courage
Predicated
Trying
Simply
Doings
Going
Imagine
Muster

More quotes by Cornel West

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The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.
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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.
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Barack Obama has domesticated the left in such a way that we feel as if we have no alternative but him...I refuse to accept that.
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We're talking about a prison-industrial complex. We're talking about a war on drugs that's generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We're talking about dilapidated housing. We're talking about joblessness and underemployment.
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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.
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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
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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.
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I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.
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I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
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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.
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The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.
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I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.
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You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
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But black folks have never really been optimists. We've been prisoners of hope, and hope is qualitatively different from optimism in the way that there's a difference between The Blues and Lawrence Welk. The Blues and Jazz have to do with hope while the other is sugarcoated music which has to do with sentimental optimism.
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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.
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All you have is a gift a to give.
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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.
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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.
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Context shapes who you are.
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Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.
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