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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
Context
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More quotes by Cornel West

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You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.
Cornel West
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When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.
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 evil is so ubiquitous in terms of objectification of all of us, that one can say that almost about any TV and even radio show.
Cornel West
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For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice.
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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Education is soul crafting.
Cornel West
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You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.
Cornel West
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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
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There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
Cornel West
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All you have is a gift a to give.
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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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
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So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.
Cornel West
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Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity.
Cornel West
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We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.
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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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
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Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
Cornel West
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Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope.
Cornel West