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There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference.

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
Difference
Differences
Interpersonal
Simply
Organizations
Individual
Fundamental
Social
Fundamentals
Action
Actions
Change
Institutions
Make
Organization

More quotes by Cornel West

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You keep folks so intimidated. You can give them money, access, but they're still scared. And as long as you're scared, you're on the plantation.
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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.
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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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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.
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If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf.
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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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Martin Luther King was an extremist of love.
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You can't move forward until you look back.
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We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good.
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There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
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My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
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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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I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts.
Cornel West
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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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In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.
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It's true that in reading an interview, I have a little critique of the objectification of women in a [Playboy] magazine that is perceived to doing that.
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I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
Cornel West
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To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.
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White supremacy is so deep-seated that it's hard to see it eliminated. But we could definitely push it back.
Cornel West