Quote

Context shapes who you are.

Cornel West

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Shapes

More quotes by Cornel West

Image
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
Image
We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.
Cornel West
Image
We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
Cornel West
Image
I recall coming across a line by the late Charles Tilly when he said, The conditions for the possibility of social movements have been called into question in the twenty-first century. And I said to myself, my god, a society in history without social movements, for me, is very difficult to live in.
Cornel West
Image
There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.
Cornel West
Image
Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.
Cornel West
Image
There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
Cornel West
Image
Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.
Cornel West
Image
There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
Cornel West
Image
If we can't get back to principles and integrity and it's reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble.
Cornel West
Image
I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.
Cornel West
Image
Wall Street is stronger than ever.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.
Cornel West
Image
I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South.
Cornel West
Image
The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.
Cornel West
Image
Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public
Cornel West
Image
I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.
Cornel West