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There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There's a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas.

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
Around
Certain
Ideas
Enact
Mind
Playfulness
Life
Denied
World
Pleasure
People
Comes
Cannot

More quotes by Cornel West

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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
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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.
Cornel West
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I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.
Cornel West
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Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That's true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future.
Cornel West
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There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
Cornel West
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It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering
Cornel West
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You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit.
Cornel West
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We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed.
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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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
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Rage is fine as long as it doesn't deteriorate into bitterness.
Cornel West
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You have to have a habitual vision of greatness ... you have to believe in fact that you will refuse to settle for mediocrity. You won't confuse your financial security with your personal integrity, you won't confuse your success with your greatness or your prosperity with your magnanimity ... believe in fact that living is connected to giving.
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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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.
Cornel West
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We're talking about a prison-industrial complex. We're talking about a war on drugs that's generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We're talking about dilapidated housing. We're talking about joblessness and underemployment.
Cornel West
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When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.
Cornel West
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Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.
Cornel West
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I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.
Cornel West
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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
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Context shapes who you are.
Cornel West