Quote

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

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
Music
Fails
Need
Jazz
Needs
Remain
Musical
Silent
Failing
Language
Cannot

More quotes by Cornel West

Image
I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.
Cornel West
Image
I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more Martin Luther King-like.
Cornel West
Image
The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.
Cornel West
Image
Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.
Cornel West
Image
Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we're true to ourselves.
Cornel West
Image
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.
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
You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways.
Cornel West
Image
I think we must never, ever demonize one another. That's true not just black people to black people that's human being to human being.
Cornel West
Image
To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
Cornel West
Image
Wealth inequality has increased.
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
Martin Luther King was a radical democrat, by which I mean someone who is a foe of wealth inequality.
Cornel West
Image
I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years Be successful, be successful, be successful as opposed to Be great, be great, be great. There's a qualitative difference.
Cornel West