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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.

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
Teaching
Exposing
Many
Willing
Bearing
Something
Called
Empowering
Always
Dies
Witness
People
Lying
Serve
Felt
Telling
Truth
Bigger
Ennoble
Lies
Empower
Live

More quotes by Cornel West

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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.
Cornel West
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The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.
Cornel West
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A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.
Cornel West
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To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love.
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, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for non-market values and non-market activity so that love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.
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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Prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past. In this sense, the praxis of prophetic pragmatism is tragic action with revolutionary intent, usually reformist consequences and always visionary outlook.
Cornel West
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I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.
Cornel West
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I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.
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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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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I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.
Cornel West
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Education is soul crafting.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.
Cornel West
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I think anytime we talk about transforming in capitalist society, we are talking about a process not a particular event so you can't talk about a socialist revolution.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.
Cornel West
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When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up.
Cornel West