Quote

He who learns death unlearns slavery.

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
Thrive
Slavery
Death
Unlearn
Learns

More quotes by Cornel West

Image
There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
Cornel West
Image
I have some notions that have people conceiving of themselves as capable of changing the world. That's why, for me, the issues of self-love, self-respect and self-regard are preconditions for human agency and especially black agency, given the fact that we have been and are such a hated and despised people.
Cornel West
Image
When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.
Cornel West
Image
The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.
Cornel West
Image
And as a Christian, I got something the world didn't give me, the world can't take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything.
Cornel West
Image
We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for non-market values and non-market activity so that love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
You've got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you'll be able to love others.
Cornel West
Image
A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.
Cornel West
Image
The important thing for me as an educator is how to - how do we unsettle the minds and touch the souls of significant numbers of young people who don't read texts or don't read my texts.
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
Martin Luther King was not a Marxist or a communist, but his radical love leads him to put poor and working people at the center.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
Anybody who takes Martin Luther King seriously has got to go beyond the standard understanding of who he was, has to connect those dots.
Cornel West
Image
To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
Cornel West
Image
Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope.
Cornel West
Image
I couldn't live without the genius of Stephen Sondheim, be it not just West Side Story,but Follies,Company,Sweeney Todd,Passion.You can go on and on.
Cornel West
Image
Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.
Cornel West
Image
For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
Cornel West
Image
Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.
Cornel West