Top 250 Cornel West Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “You can’t move forward until you look back.”

— Cornel West

Featured in: Reflection Quotes, Past Quotes

2. “Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.”

— Cornel West

Featured in: Morality Quotes, Values Quotes, Justice Quotes

3. “We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.”

— Cornel West

Featured in: Relationship Quotes, Care Quotes, Commitment Quotes, Love Is Quotes, Couple Quotes

4. “There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.”

— Cornel West

Featured in: Honesty Quotes

5. “You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people. You can’t save the people if you don’t serve the people.”

— Cornel West

Featured in: Humanism Quotes

6. “Education is soul crafting.”

— Cornel West

7. “A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it.”

— Cornel West

8. “Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity.”

— Cornel West

9. “Justice is what Love looks like in public.”

— Cornel West

10. “I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”

— Cornel West

11. “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.”

— Cornel West

12. “You’ve got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it.”

— Cornel West

13. “The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice.”

— Cornel West

14. “You can’t have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.”

— Cornel West

15. “Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.”

— Cornel West

16. “To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.”

— Cornel West

17. “Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.”

— Cornel West

18. “Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it’s ethically driven.”

— Cornel West

19. “I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism – the idolatry of the 20th century.”

— Cornel West

20. “We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.”

— Cornel West

21. “We are who we are because somebody loved us.”

— Cornel West

22. “To be human you must bear witness to justice.”

— Cornel West

23. “I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself.”

— Cornel West

24. “It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.”

— Cornel West

25. “Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.”

— Cornel West

26. “Optimism is evidence-based.”

— Cornel West

27. “As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.”

— Cornel West

28. “If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.”

— Cornel West

29. “Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher – for any human being, I think, in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.”

— Cornel West

30. “The powerful have no monopoly on greed, hatred, fear, or ignorance.”

— Cornel West

31. “All individuals have the same value, not to be determined by market price. They’re made in the image and likeness of God.”

— Cornel West

32. “When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.”

— Cornel West

33. “The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.”

— Cornel West

34. “Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That’s true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future.”

— Cornel West

35. “Black people have always been America’s wilderness in search of a promised land.”

— Cornel West

36. “There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one’s mind that warrants freedom.”

— Cornel West

37. “A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.”

— Cornel West

38. “The rage is still there but I found the right kind of channel, because it’s tied to a love, it’s tied to a struggle for justice. And most importantly, for me, it’s tied to a recognition that I am a cracked vessel.”

— Cornel West

39. “Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that’s being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.”

— Cornel West

40. “It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.”

— Cornel West

41. “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

42. “And as a Christian, I got something the world didn’t give me, the world can’t take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything.”

— Cornel West

43. “To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies.”

— Cornel West

44. “I’m a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration – joy and pain – sit side by side.”

— Cornel West

45. “Be willing to learn, because none of us know the truth.”

— Cornel West

46. “We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.”

— Cornel West

47. “I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it.”

— Cornel West

48. “I’ve been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.”

— Cornel West

49. “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.”

— Cornel West

50. “Like alcoholism and drug addiction, nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse. But there is always a chance for conversion – a chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle... Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care.”

— Cornel West