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Martin Luther King was not a Marxist or a communist, but his radical love leads him to put poor and working people at the center.

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
King
Kings
Marxist
Working
Martin
Poor
Luther
Love
Communist
People
Center
Radical
Leads

More quotes by Cornel West

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For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo.
Cornel West
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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
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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
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Poor people can be greedy, too. It's just that they don't have any material resources. We need shaping of the souls as well as shaping of our institutions.
Cornel West
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Justice is what love looks like in public.
Cornel West
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I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.
Cornel West
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To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love.
Cornel West
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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
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Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.
Cornel West
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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
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In the practice of radical love, you are embracing human beings across the board, but you do give a preference - very much like Jesus - to the least of these, to the weak, to the vulnerable. That includes poor whites and poor browns, as well as the poor in black ghettos.
Cornel West
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Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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The aim is not for me to be right. The aim is to make sure that we keep the focus on the people who are suffering. That's what we're here for.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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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.
Cornel West
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Education is soul crafting.
Cornel West
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what I think separates me from most philosophers probably is that I'm a bluesman in the life of the mind, I'm a jazzman in the world of ideas.
Cornel West
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Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
Cornel West
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Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.
Cornel West