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

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When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.
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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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Certainly Martin Luther King, in the mainstream perception of him, had a dream. Yes, he did. But the question becomes, what was that dream? It wasn't the American Dream. It was a dream that all human beings, especially poor and working people, be treated with dignity.
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We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.
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Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.
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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.
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Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.
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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.
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I love the academy in terms of the life of the mind and the world of ideas. I also love the streets. I love the churches and mosques and synagogues. I love the trade union centers. I love the community centers. I speak regularly at prisons and so forth.
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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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I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.
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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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I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay.
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Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.
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Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.
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I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.
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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.
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For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites.
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It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
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To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
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