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The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.

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
Dark
Hope
Tell
Truth
Prisoners
Pessimistic
Blues
Prisoner
Aren

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Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.
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Black people have been working hard for decades.
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Drew Dellinger is one of the most creative, courageous and prophetic poets of his generation. I love his spirit. Don't miss him!
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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.
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Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.
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There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
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Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.
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I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.
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The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.
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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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Education is soul crafting.
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It would just be nice if we had leaders in Washington who could unequivocally take a stand on behalf of democratic movements in other parts of the world. And even this is true for even Brother Barack Obama.
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It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.
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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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You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.
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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.
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I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets it's not either/or, it's not over or against.
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As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.
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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.
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Certainly Martin Luther King, in the mainstream perception of him, had a dream. Yes, he did. But the question becomes, what was that dream? It wasn't the American Dream. It was a dream that all human beings, especially poor and working people, be treated with dignity.
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