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

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If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf.
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The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.
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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
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Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.
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Anybody who takes Martin Luther King seriously has got to go beyond the standard understanding of who he was, has to connect those dots.
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There's a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde.
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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.
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The legacy of [Martin Luther] King is the very thing that must be expanded if America is to be free and democratic in the 21st century. It's just as simple as that.
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As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.
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A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all.
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I think hip-hop can be prophetic and progressive, and at the same time, the dominant forms tend to be homophobic, misogynistic and something that we need to critically call into question.
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Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
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Justice is what love looks like in public.
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Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.
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I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes. It could be homophobia, it could be white supremacy, male supremacy, imperial arrogance, class subordination or whatever.
Cornel West
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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.
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Martin Luther King was an extremist of love.
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I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.
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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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I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.
Cornel West