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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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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
Legacy
Love
King
Service
Mortar
Kings
Render
Rather
Bricks
Lives
Martin
Live
Luther
Kind
Measured

More quotes by Cornel West

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The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence.
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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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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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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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Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
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In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.
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I was blessed to be part of a commercial, pushing for this energy bill, but we've been unsuccessful.
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Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.
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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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The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.
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The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.
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Martin Luther King wanted to be morally consistent and speak out against various things that were wrong, not just racism.
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You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
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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.
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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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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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The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them.
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Martin King was fundamentally committed to the least of these [poor, working people]. Of course, he was a Christian soldier for justice from the 25th chapter of Matthew.
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It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.
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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