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There is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

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
Responsibility
Individual
Action
Without
Thing
Institutional
Always
Actions
Conditions
Personal

More quotes by Cornel West

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I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.
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Wall Street is stronger than ever.
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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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Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.
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To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.
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I do believe that not just the churches but strong communities, strong trade unions, strong families can make a difference in terms of producing persons much more virtuous than what one usually finds in a gangster culture.
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Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.
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There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one's mind that warrants freedom.
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The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence.
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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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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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Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways.
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The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.
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Philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom.
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Justice is what love looks like in public.
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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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When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.
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Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.
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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.
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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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