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Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.

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
Matter
Innocent
Kind
Shots
Always
Structure
Usually
Structures
Never
Pleasure
Domination
Social
Desirable
Order
Assuming
Certain
Shot

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Truth is fine. Absolutely.
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We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but Martin Luther King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head.
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Martin Luther King wanted to be morally consistent and speak out against various things that were wrong, not just racism.
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The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.
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Frederick Douglas's agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it's spilt over for women's rights it's split over for worker's rights and so forth.
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It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering
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You can't move forward until you look back.
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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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Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.
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Success is such a relative thing for me. I'm fundamentally a Christian which means that ultimately all of the penultimate titles and things you just had to wear with a loose garment. Really.
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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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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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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.
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For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites.
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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.
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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.
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When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.
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In the practice of radical love, you are embracing human beings across the board, but you do give a preference - very much like Jesus - to the least of these, to the weak, to the vulnerable. That includes poor whites and poor browns, as well as the poor in black ghettos.
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I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes. It could be homophobia, it could be white supremacy, male supremacy, imperial arrogance, class subordination or whatever.
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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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