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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.

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
Mean
Really
Allows
Intellectual
Suffering
Means
Speak
Truth

More quotes by Cornel West

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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.
Cornel West
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I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more Martin Luther King-like.
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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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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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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We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed.
Cornel West
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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.
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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When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.
Cornel West
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I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.
Cornel West
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I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.
Cornel West
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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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This is what it is for Asians to be part of - support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it's a matter of justice.
Cornel West
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I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That's why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don't get out of hand.
Cornel West
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We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.
Cornel West
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We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.
Cornel West
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It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
Cornel West
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When you love poor people THAT MUCH, when you love 'working people' THAT MUCH, that makes you the freest man/woman in the country. - Cornel West in explaining that Obama is A fulfillment of MLK's dream not THE fulfillment of MLK's dream
Cornel West
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The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they're on the road to freedom and that means they're gonna run up against the powers that be.
Cornel West
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There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
Cornel West