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The problem is that in America is that the nation state has been so weak when it comes to the history of big markets the history of big business in a way so we have a very weak welfare state compared to European nation states.

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
Way
State
Bigs
Markets
History
Compared
Business
European
Comes
Welfare
America
Weak
Problem
Nation
States
Nations

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Black people have been working hard for decades.
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The women can always choose the patriarchal models, and you end up with a Margaret Thatcher.
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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.
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Nobody in my family or in my neighborhood used the language that they used at the University of Chicago. I remember the first time I heard the word value repeated again and again by my professor. Value to me was the price of a frying pan.
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To be human you must bear witness to justice.
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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.
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Well technologically and so forth, it's a breakthrough, and yet [Birth of a Nation,] it's very white supremacist to the core in terms of the narrative content.
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Justice is what love looks like in public.
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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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We're all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time - that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.
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You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
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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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The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people.
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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property, it doesn't leave a whole lot of time for non-market values and non-market activity so that love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.
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When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.
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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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We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.
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There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
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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.
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The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.
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