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The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence.

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
Certain
Damaging
Self
Peoples
Images
Confidence
Beauty
Church
Often
Black
Reinforced

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He who learns death unlearns slavery.
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If you are always trying to do something for a cause bigger than you - connected with serving others - then it is hard to be guilty.
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Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.
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To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.
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It's true that in reading an interview, I have a little critique of the objectification of women in a [Playboy] magazine that is perceived to doing that.
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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.
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I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
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Martin Luther King was an extremist of love.
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Certainly Martin Luther King, in the mainstream perception of him, had a dream. Yes, he did. But the question becomes, what was that dream? It wasn't the American Dream. It was a dream that all human beings, especially poor and working people, be treated with dignity.
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To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love.
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Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.
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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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The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people.
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A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.
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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.
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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.
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So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.
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Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways.
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Martin Luther King wanted to be morally consistent and speak out against various things that were wrong, not just racism.
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