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We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.

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
Toward
Linguistically
Beings
Urine
Conscious
Terrestrial
Whose
Legged
Born
Worms
Death
Culinary
Two
Delight
Body
Creatures
Feces

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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.
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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.
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If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf.
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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.
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Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
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Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we're true to ourselves.
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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.
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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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I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.
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I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That's why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don't get out of hand.
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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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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
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I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself.
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The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.
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The evil is so ubiquitous in terms of objectification of all of us, that one can say that almost about any TV and even radio show.
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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.
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It's true that in reading an interview, I have a little critique of the objectification of women in a [Playboy] magazine that is perceived to doing that.
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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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what I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.
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There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There's a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas.
Cornel West