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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
Speaking
Price
Bigger
Pay
Lying
Living
Truth

More quotes by Cornel West

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In the practice of radical love, you are embracing human beings across the board, but you do give a preference - very much like Jesus - to the least of these, to the weak, to the vulnerable. That includes poor whites and poor browns, as well as the poor in black ghettos.
Cornel West
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Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.
Cornel West
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Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity.
Cornel West
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Life is such a mysterious thing that you are up one day you are down the next day. A lot of the homeless brothers and sisters who were a success ten years ago, they are now on the street. Maybe ten years later they will be a success, but the crucial question is what is the quality of their life.
Cornel West
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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
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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.
Cornel West
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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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Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
Cornel West
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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.
Cornel West
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I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.
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.
Cornel West
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Wall Street is stronger than ever.
Cornel West
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To be human you must bear witness to justice.
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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And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you.
Cornel West
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There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
Cornel West
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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
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When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.
Cornel West