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For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.

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
Talk
Rhythms
Talking
Plato
Words
Primarily
Part
Central
Music
Tone
Rhythm
Notes
Poetry
Timbre

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There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
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You can't move forward until you look back.
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It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.
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We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.
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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.
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Martin Luther King was an extremist of love.
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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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Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we're true to ourselves.
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To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love.
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what I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.
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We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.
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I think we must never, ever demonize one another. That's true not just black people to black people that's human being to human being.
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I have some notions that have people conceiving of themselves as capable of changing the world. That's why, for me, the issues of self-love, self-respect and self-regard are preconditions for human agency and especially black agency, given the fact that we have been and are such a hated and despised people.
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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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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.
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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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