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Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.

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
Failing
Language
Cannot
Music
Fails
Need
Jazz
Needs
Remain
Musical
Silent

More quotes by Cornel West

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Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.
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.
Cornel West
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Rage is fine as long as it doesn't deteriorate into bitterness.
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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Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street.
Cornel West
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You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
Cornel West
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We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
Cornel West
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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
Cornel West
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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
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A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all.
Cornel West
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My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
Cornel West
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Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.
Cornel West
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The wonderful thing about the black church for me is that it forces you to come to terms with the centrality of love in the world.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.
Cornel West
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You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit.
Cornel West
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There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
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