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I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.
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
Emphasis
Keys
Means
Mean
Minor
Minors
More quotes by Cornel West
There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
Cornel West
Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.
Cornel West
There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
Cornel West
I certainly support the right of the gay brothers and sisters to come together. I believe true love can take a number of different forms. If they choose to be married that's fine, but the important thing is I hope they find love
Cornel West
You can't move forward until you look back.
Cornel West
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
Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.
Cornel West
It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.
Cornel West
The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.
Cornel West
But black folks have never really been optimists. We've been prisoners of hope, and hope is qualitatively different from optimism in the way that there's a difference between The Blues and Lawrence Welk. The Blues and Jazz have to do with hope while the other is sugarcoated music which has to do with sentimental optimism.
Cornel West
Any great artist is wrestling with their sadness and loneliness, their fears, anxieties and securities, and they're transfiguring those into complicated forms of expression that affect our hearts, minds and souls and remind us of who we are as human beings, the fragility of our human status and the inevitability of death.
Cornel West
When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.
Cornel West
We are a democracy and we don't believe in just hunting down gangsters and killing them. We believe in trying to find the gangsters and bring them back for trial, and give them a trial under rule of law. That's what democracies do.
Cornel West
All you have is a gift a to give.
Cornel West
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
Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
Cornel West
In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.
Cornel West
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
We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.
Cornel West
Poor people can be greedy, too. It's just that they don't have any material resources. We need shaping of the souls as well as shaping of our institutions.
Cornel West
