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It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine 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
Thinking
Examine
Tremendous
Discipline
Courage
Takes
Think

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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
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If the churches don't move, much of the community won't move. We've got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors.
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Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.
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There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
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If you are always trying to do something for a cause bigger than you - connected with serving others - then it is hard to be guilty.
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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.
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Hey, you got something going here. I think we've got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.
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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.
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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
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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.
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Barack Obama has domesticated the left in such a way that we feel as if we have no alternative but him...I refuse to accept that.
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We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.
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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.
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Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.
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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.
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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.
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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
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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.
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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.
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I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
Cornel West