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You keep folks so intimidated. You can give them money, access, but they're still scared. And as long as you're scared, you're on the plantation.

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
Scared
Keep
Money
Give
Plantation
Still
Plantations
Long
Intimidated
Access
Folks

More quotes by Cornel West

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Nobody in my family or in my neighborhood used the language that they used at the University of Chicago. I remember the first time I heard the word value repeated again and again by my professor. Value to me was the price of a frying pan.
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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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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.
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You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
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I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself.
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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.
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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.
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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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The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.
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Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.
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It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering
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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
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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
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There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.
Cornel West
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American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows.
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We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions.
Cornel West
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I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions.
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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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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.
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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!
Cornel West