Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Cornel West
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: June 2
Actor
Critic
Philosopher
Theologian
University Teacher
Writer
Tulsa
Oklahoma
Cornel Ronald West
Cornel R. West
Never
Demonize
Think
Black
Thinking
Another
People
True
Ever
Human
Humans
Must

More quotes by Cornel West

Image
We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
Martin Luther King was a radical democrat, by which I mean someone who is a foe of wealth inequality.
Cornel West
Image
There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
Cornel West
Image
Truth is fine. Absolutely.
Cornel West
Image
If we can't get back to principles and integrity and it's reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble.
Cornel West
Image
He who learns death unlearns slavery.
Cornel West
Image
When you love poor people THAT MUCH, when you love 'working people' THAT MUCH, that makes you the freest man/woman in the country. - Cornel West in explaining that Obama is A fulfillment of MLK's dream not THE fulfillment of MLK's dream
Cornel West
Image
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
Image
Martin Luther King's legacy is never to be measured by bricks and mortar, but rather by the kind of lives that we live, and the kind of love and service that we render.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up.
Cornel West
Image
There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.
Cornel West
Image
To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.
Cornel West
Image
It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.
Cornel West
Image
There are various forms of weaponry, intellectual weaponry, spiritual weaponry, political weaponry, economic weaponry. Because we are on the battlefield, and there are bullets flying, some symbolic, some literal and the life of the mind is a crucial place where the battle goes on.
Cornel West
Image
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.
Cornel West
Image
Justice is what love looks like in public.
Cornel West
Image
You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.
Cornel West