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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
Live
Lies
Empower
Many
Teaching
Exposing
Something
Willing
Bearing
Always
Called
Empowering
People
Dies
Witness
Lying
Serve
Felt
Telling
Truth
Bigger
Ennoble
More quotes by Cornel West
You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
Cornel West
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
In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.
Cornel West
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
Success is such a relative thing for me. I'm fundamentally a Christian which means that ultimately all of the penultimate titles and things you just had to wear with a loose garment. Really.
Cornel West
Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.
Cornel West
The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison - you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.
Cornel West
There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference.
Cornel West
You've got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you'll be able to love others.
Cornel West
The important thing for me as an educator is how to - how do we unsettle the minds and touch the souls of significant numbers of young people who don't read texts or don't read my texts.
Cornel West
You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
Cornel West
Life is such a mysterious thing that you are up one day you are down the next day. A lot of the homeless brothers and sisters who were a success ten years ago, they are now on the street. Maybe ten years later they will be a success, but the crucial question is what is the quality of their life.
Cornel West
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
To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.
Cornel West
Drew Dellinger is one of the most creative, courageous and prophetic poets of his generation. I love his spirit. Don't miss him!
Cornel West
Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.
Cornel West
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
It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.
Cornel West
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.
Cornel West
The interesting thing for me is, if that had been a left-wing person raising questions, [President Obama] probably would have expressed his anger. Because Obama really does get upset about progressives.
Cornel West