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We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

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
Sentence
Talked
Sentences
Disappear
Kafka
Creatures
Profundity
Space
Disappearing
Death
Vanishing
Time
Organisms

More quotes by Cornel West

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what I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.
Cornel West
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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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For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.
Cornel West
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The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
Cornel West
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I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
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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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
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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.
Cornel West
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You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
Cornel West
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We're talking about a prison-industrial complex. We're talking about a war on drugs that's generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We're talking about dilapidated housing. We're talking about joblessness and underemployment.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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Black people have been working hard for decades.
Cornel West
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I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.
Cornel West
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Barack Obama has domesticated the left in such a way that we feel as if we have no alternative but him...I refuse to accept that.
Cornel West
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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.
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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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
Cornel West