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Poor people can be greedy, too. It's just that they don't have any material resources. We need shaping of the souls as well as shaping of our institutions.

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
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Needs
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People
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Poor
Soul
Shaping
Wells
Greedy
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Souls

More quotes by Cornel West

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You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.
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As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.
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Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.
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Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
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Frederick Douglas's agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it's spilt over for women's rights it's split over for worker's rights and so forth.
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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
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There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
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Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.
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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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I was a gangster when I was young. I had a Robin Hood mentality and tended to always want to support the weak against the strong, but sometimes it was cohesive and I really needed to fall in love with the power of education to find the right venue to express my rage. I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes.
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I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.
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It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.
Cornel West
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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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I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South.
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Truth is fine. Absolutely.
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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.
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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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Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.
Cornel West
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The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.
Cornel West
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There are various forms of weaponry, intellectual weaponry, spiritual weaponry, political weaponry, economic weaponry. Because we are on the battlefield, and there are bullets flying, some symbolic, some literal and the life of the mind is a crucial place where the battle goes on.
Cornel West