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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
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More quotes by Cornel West

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It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.
Cornel West
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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
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You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.
Cornel West
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We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.
Cornel West
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Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.
Cornel West
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I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it's a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver's seat regarding their lives.
Cornel West
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It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.
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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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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The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.
Cornel West
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There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.
Cornel West
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The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.
Cornel West
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Martin King was fundamentally committed to the least of these [poor, working people]. Of course, he was a Christian soldier for justice from the 25th chapter of Matthew.
Cornel West
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The wonderful thing about the black church for me is that it forces you to come to terms with the centrality of love in the world.
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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Part of the problem is we had so far to go, given the deep homophobia in our society. But, the movement is very real. The movement is very real.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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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
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As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.
Cornel West
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And as a Christian, I got something the world didn't give me, the world can't take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything.
Cornel West