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As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.

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
Long
Stays
Oppression
Overcoming
Remains
Meaning
Possibility
Alive
Hope
Preserved

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I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.
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Jesus loves a free black man.
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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.
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I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.
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Any great artist is wrestling with their sadness and loneliness, their fears, anxieties and securities, and they're transfiguring those into complicated forms of expression that affect our hearts, minds and souls and remind us of who we are as human beings, the fragility of our human status and the inevitability of death.
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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
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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.
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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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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.
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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
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The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.
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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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We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.
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There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
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The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.
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Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal.
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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.
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You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
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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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As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.
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