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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
Soul
Shaping
Wells
Greedy
Well
Souls
Need
Material
Needs
Institutions
People
Materials
Resources
Poor

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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.
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I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years Be successful, be successful, be successful as opposed to Be great, be great, be great. There's a qualitative difference.
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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.
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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
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I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself.
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There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
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Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.
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The aim is not for me to be right. The aim is to make sure that we keep the focus on the people who are suffering. That's what we're here for.
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The evil is so ubiquitous in terms of objectification of all of us, that one can say that almost about any TV and even radio show.
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A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all.
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In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.
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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.
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We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but Martin Luther King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head.
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I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets it's not either/or, it's not over or against.
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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
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To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.
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Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
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A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.
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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.
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Jesus loves a free black man.
Cornel West