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There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.

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
Truth
Speaking
Price
Bigger
Pay
Lying
Living

More quotes by Cornel West

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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
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liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.
Cornel West
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Martin Luther King wanted to be morally consistent and speak out against various things that were wrong, not just racism.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.
Cornel West
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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
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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
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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.
Cornel West
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We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.
Cornel West
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I recall coming across a line by the late Charles Tilly when he said, The conditions for the possibility of social movements have been called into question in the twenty-first century. And I said to myself, my god, a society in history without social movements, for me, is very difficult to live in.
Cornel West
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There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.
Cornel West
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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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You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.
Cornel West
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Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
Cornel West
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We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good.
Cornel West
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Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.
Cornel West
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Rage is fine as long as it doesn't deteriorate into bitterness.
Cornel West
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Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
Cornel West