Top 250 Cornel West Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 6

101. “Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.”

— Cornel West

102. “He who learns death unlearns slavery.”

— Cornel West

103. “For me music is central, so when one’s talking about poetry, for the most part Plato’s talking primarily about words, where I talk about notes, I talk about tone, I talk about timbre, I talk about rhythms.”

— Cornel West

104. “We’re all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time – that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.”

— Cornel West

105. “Success is such a relative thing for me. I’m fundamentally a Christian which means that ultimately all of the penultimate titles and things you just had to wear with a loose garment. Really.”

— Cornel West

106. “When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain.”

— Cornel West

107. “I am not optimistic, but I’ve never been optimistic about humankind or America. The evidence never looks good in terms of forces for good actually becoming prominent.”

— Cornel West

108. “I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.”

— Cornel West

109. “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.”

— Cornel West

110. “It’s just that the churches have been sleeping for a long time. A lot of people argue that the churches are even dead. I don’t believe they’re dead, but they’ve been sleeping, but they, I hope, will wake up, and that’s one of my tasks is to make sure they wake up as much as they do before I die.”

— Cornel West

111. “I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.”

— Cornel West

112. “The wonderful thing about the black church for me is that it forces you to come to terms with the centrality of love in the world.”

— Cornel West

113. “And when you love people, you hate the fact that they’re being treated unfairly. You tell the truth. You sacrifice your popularity for integrity. There is a willingness to give your life back to the people given that, in the end, they basically gave it to you, because we are who we are because somebody loved us anyway.”

— Cornel West

114. “Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.”

— Cornel West

115. “For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane’s a poet of tempo.”

— Cornel West

116. “Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?”

— Cornel West

117. “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.”

— Cornel West

118. “Homophobia is very, very difficult to root out, to extricate. That’s why we have to bear witness. That’s why we have to be so public about it, and that’s why we can’t just play footsie with it.”

— Cornel West

119. “Life is such a mysterious thing that you are up one day; you are down the next day. A lot of the homeless brothers and sisters who were a success ten years ago, they are now on the street. Maybe ten years later they will be a success, but the crucial question is what is the quality of their life.”

— Cornel West

120. “I’m actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.”

— Cornel West

121. “We’re learning lessons from Africa. And the lesson that we need to learn is, how do we straighten our backs up in the face of these oligarchs and plutocrats who are trying to snatch the best of our democracy away?”

— Cornel West

122. “I’m a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.”

— Cornel West

123. “Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.”

— Cornel West

124. “There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.”

— Cornel West

125. “Part of the popularity with Louis Farrakhan has less to do with the content of his message and more to do with the form that he portrays himself – as being a free, black person who speaks what is on his mind with boldness and fearlessness. Who is willing to pay the consequences.”

— Cornel West

126. “The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.”

— Cornel West

127. “For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice.”

— Cornel West

128. “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

129. “It’s impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.”

— Cornel West

130. “When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That’s not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important.”

— Cornel West

131. “If the churches don’t move, much of the community won’t move. We’ve got a situation in which a black church is still a major institution in the black community where 55 percent of the black folk attend and over 75 pass through its doors.”

— Cornel West

132. “Jesus loves a free black man.”

— Cornel West

133. “The courage to be is the most difficult thing for any human being.”

— Cornel West

134. “I’m not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of “just war” that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that’s the last, last resort.”

— Cornel West

135. “Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.”

— Cornel West

136. “We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz’s people and others, who say, you know what? We’re sophisticated economists but we’re concerned about poor and working people.”

— Cornel West

137. “This book is the best treatment of the best American Marxist philosopher-and the best philosopher to emerge from American slums. Young Sidney Hook is essential reading for anyone interested in democratic theory and practice in America.”

— Cornel West

138. “Michael Jackson was part of that tremendous wave in the ocean of human expression and it happened to be located first and foremost in Gary, Indiana, working class.”

— Cornel West

139. “Isabel Wilkerson’s book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don’t miss it!”

— Cornel West

140. “Being a Christian is not a political orientation for the president, but he is a centrist.”

— Cornel West

141. “Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street.”

— Cornel West

142. “I think, Tom Friedman is right, and I think that we have to – we have to have a serious public dialogue to try to shift public policy in that regard.”

— Cornel West

143. “I try to, in my own fallible way, speak the truth.”

— Cornel West

144. “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

145. “The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they’re on the road to freedom and that means they’re gonna run up against the powers that be.”

— Cornel West

146. “We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.”

— Cornel West

147. “The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.”

— Cornel West

148. “Philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia; that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom.”

— Cornel West

149. “We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions.”

— Cornel West

150. “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.”

— Cornel West