Quote

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

Cornel West

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cornel West
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 2
Actor
Critic
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Tulsa
Oklahoma
Cornel Ronald West
Cornel R. West
Fire
Others
Soul
Feel
Must
Feels
Blues
Intellectual

More quotes by Cornel West

Image
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
Image
For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.
Cornel West
Image
The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
Cornel West
Image
I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.
Cornel West
Image
Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
There used to be corporations that produced products. Now there are just banks that produce deals, hedge-fund-driven banks and derivatives and those things.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.
Cornel West
Image
Our problem is that we don't have enough people in America, including black people, who are progressive and willing to sacrifice their popularity in order to tell the truth.
Cornel West
Image
So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.
Cornel West
Image
There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
Cornel West
Image
Rage is fine as long as it doesn't deteriorate into bitterness.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West