Quote

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.

Cornel West

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cornel West
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 2
Actor
Critic
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Tulsa
Oklahoma
Cornel Ronald West
Cornel R. West
Joy
Side
Plantations
Sides
Soaked
Pain
Catastrophe
Moving
Blues
America
Celebration
World
Planet
Planets

More quotes by Cornel West

Image
To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
Cornel West
Image
The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.
Cornel West
Image
I certainly support the right of the gay brothers and sisters to come together. I believe true love can take a number of different forms. If they choose to be married that's fine, but the important thing is I hope they find love
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
You can't move forward until you look back.
Cornel West
Image
I think anytime we talk about transforming in capitalist society, we are talking about a process not a particular event so you can't talk about a socialist revolution.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
Cornel West
Image
I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
Cornel West
Image
Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
Cornel West
Image
It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.
Cornel West
Image
Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.
Cornel West
Image
The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence.
Cornel West
Image
For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites.
Cornel West
Image
We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.
Cornel West
Image
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