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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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Cornel West
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 2
Actor
Critic
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Tulsa
Oklahoma
Cornel Ronald West
Cornel R. West
Self
Society
Mean
American
Thing
Freedom
Respecting
Means
Powers
Black
Loving
Running
Gonna
Persons
Road
Person
Dangerous

More quotes by Cornel West

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The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.
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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You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
Cornel West
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If we can't get back to principles and integrity and it's reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble.
Cornel West
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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
Cornel West
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Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we're true to ourselves.
Cornel West
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To be human you must bear witness to justice.
Cornel West
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There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.
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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He who learns death unlearns slavery.
Cornel West
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My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
Cornel West
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We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.
Cornel West
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I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more Martin Luther King-like.
Cornel West
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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
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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I think we must never, ever demonize one another. That's true not just black people to black people that's human being to human being.
Cornel West
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I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.
Cornel West
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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