Top 250 Cornel West Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.”

— Cornel West

52. “It’s so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that’s what is dangerous.”

— Cornel West

53. “Being a hope is being in motion, on the move with body on the line, mind set on freedom, soul full of courage, and heart shot through with love. Being a hope is forging moral and spiritual fortitude, putting on intellectual armor, and being willing to live and die for the empowerment of the wretched of the earth.”

— Cornel West

54. “You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.”

— Cornel West

55. “The black church is dormant, much of the community is dormant. If the black church is leaning toward the right, much of the community is leaning toward the right. If it is leaning in the left wing direction having repercussions.”

— Cornel West

56. “The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.”

— Cornel West

57. “The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.”

— Cornel West

58. “John Coltrane was an addict; Billie Holiday was an addict; Eugene O’Neill was an addict. What would America be without addicts and post-addicts who make such grand contributions to our society?”

— Cornel West

59. “Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.”

— Cornel West

60. “The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, and the condition of being the truth is to transform your suffering with great creativity and compassion into forms and deeds that empower others to do likewise in their own ways.”

— Cornel West

61. “The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.”

— Cornel West

62. “Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one’s soul. This turning is done through one’s own affirmation of one’s worth – an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.”

— Cornel West

63. “It is very difficult to sustain a high-quality relationship that has the kind of mutual intensity, that has a kind of mutual respect, without putting in time.”

— Cornel West

64. “I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft.”

— Cornel West

65. “Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.”

— Cornel West

66. “The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.”

— Cornel West

67. “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.”

— Cornel West

68. “I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts.”

— Cornel West

69. “Context shapes who you are.”

— Cornel West

70. “I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes. It could be homophobia, it could be white supremacy, male supremacy, imperial arrogance, class subordination or whatever.”

— Cornel West

71. “The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It’s been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it’s been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it.”

— Cornel West

72. “To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.”

— Cornel West

73. “Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It’s a form of spiritual emptiness.”

— Cornel West

74. “The evil is so ubiquitous in terms of objectification of all of us, that one can say that almost about any TV and even radio show.”

— Cornel West

75. “I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years “Be successful, be successful, be successful” as opposed to “Be great, be great, be great”. There’s a qualitative difference.”

— Cornel West

76. “All you have is a gift a to give.”

— Cornel West

77. “As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.”

— Cornel West

78. “Interrogate yours hidden assumptions.”

— Cornel West

79. “White supremacy is so deep-seated that it’s hard to see it eliminated. But we could definitely push it back.”

— Cornel West

80. “As long as you’re scared you’re on the plantation.”

— Cornel West

81. “I don’t draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can’t stand white supremacy. I can’t stand male supremacy. I can’t stand imperial subjugation. I can’t stand homophobia.”

— Cornel West

82. “Part of the challenge of the Barack Obama campaign was to try to neutralize that white backlash, and of course, he was masterful in doing that.”

— Cornel West

83. “QUALITY leadership is neither the product of one great individual nor the result of odd historical accidents. Rather, it comes from deeply bred traditions and communities that shape and mold talented and gifted persons. Without a vibrant tradition of resistance passed on to new generations, there can be no nurturing of a collective and critical consciousness – only professional conscientiousness survives.”

— Cornel West

84. “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

85. “If we can’t get back to principles and integrity and it’s reduced just the interest of calculation and Machiavellian manipulation, we are in deep trouble.”

— Cornel West

86. “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.”

— Cornel West

87. “You can’t talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it’s precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.”

— Cornel West

88. “I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That’s why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don’t get out of hand.”

— Cornel West

89. “To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.”

— Cornel West

90. “We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification – be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.”

— Cornel West

91. “Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.”

— Cornel West

92. “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.”

— Cornel West

93. “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.”

— Cornel West

94. “There’s a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There’s a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas.”

— Cornel West

95. “It’s fashionable to be indifferent to other people’s suffering.”

— Cornel West

96. “There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference.”

— Cornel West

97. “I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it’s a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver’s seat regarding their lives.”

— Cornel West

98. “When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.”

— Cornel West

99. “Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.”

— Cornel West

100. “We’re talking about a prison-industrial complex. We’re talking about a war on drugs that’s generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We’re talking about dilapidated housing. We’re talking about joblessness and underemployment.”

— Cornel West