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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.

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
Mean
Loose
Thing
Relative
Really
Titles
Things
Ultimately
Wear
Penultimate
Success
Garment
Christian
Garments
Means
Fundamentally

More quotes by Cornel West

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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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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.
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For me music is central, so when one's talking about poetry, for the most part Plato's talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.
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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.
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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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I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft.
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When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.
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Martin Luther King was an extremist of love.
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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
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Education is soul crafting.
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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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You're going to end up with a government in Egypt that is concerned about the precious Palestinians, the same way we ought to be concerned about both precious Palestinians and precious Jews.
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To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.
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American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows.
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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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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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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
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I've been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.
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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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