Top 250 Cornel West Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “I would want to conceive of philosophy as grounded in the very long humanist tradition that is the best of the West, which is open to the East and North and South.”

— Cornel West

202. “I think we must never, ever demonize one another. That’s true not just black people to black people; that’s human being to human being.”

— Cornel West

203. “I have a whole lot of fun in trying to serve others and just keeping it funky, trying to keep it real, trying to ensure that we are able to be ourselves and get beyond these deodorized discourses and deodorized spaces that put on masks.”

— Cornel West

204. “In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.”

— Cornel West

205. “We can’t have a freedom struggle without free choice.”

— Cornel West

206. “Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.”

— Cornel West

207. “You’re going to end up with a government in Egypt that is concerned about the precious Palestinians, the same way we ought to be concerned about both precious Palestinians and precious Jews.”

— Cornel West

208. “You work through race, you don’t deny race. It’s the difference between being color-blind and love-struck. You see, if I love you, I don’t need to eliminate your whiteness. If you love me, you don’t need to eliminate my blackness. You embrace humanity.”

— Cornel West

209. “I’m sure I’ve had my phone tapped for years, I don’t think it’s a crime against humanity they just ought to quit doing it, god damn it.”

— Cornel West

210. “Fantasies are real. They have effects on your soul, even though, as I was too young to really step forward.”

— Cornel West

211. “I certainly support the right of the gay brothers and sisters to come together. I believe true love can take a number of different forms. If they choose to be married that’s fine, but the important thing is I hope they find love.”

— Cornel West

212. “Rage is fine as long as it doesn’t deteriorate into bitterness.”

— Cornel West

213. “The aim is not for me to be right. The aim is to make sure that we keep the focus on the people who are suffering. That’s what we’re here for.”

— Cornel West

214. “I think hip-hop can be prophetic and progressive, and at the same time, the dominant forms tend to be homophobic, misogynistic and something that we need to critically call into question.”

— Cornel West

215. “I’m black, so, you know, I’m again with black folk, but it’s a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices.”

— Cornel West

216. “There is no organizations and institutions that are worthwhile in terms of fighting for and dying for unless there is some individual integrity and character and virtue that is at work within various individuals in those institutions especially their leaders.”

— Cornel West

217. “And when I talk about love, I’m talking about something that’s great, though, brother. I’m talking about something that will sustain you.”

— Cornel West

218. “Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos.”

— Cornel West

219. “I do believe that not just the churches but strong communities, strong trade unions, strong families can make a difference in terms of producing persons much more virtuous than what one usually finds in a gangster culture.”

— Cornel West

220. “Hey, you got something going here. I think we’ve got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.”

— Cornel West

221. “One is that I am a regular, everyday person, you know what I mean. I feel that wherever I am, I really am.”

— Cornel West

222. “There are various forms of weaponry, intellectual weaponry, spiritual weaponry, political weaponry, economic weaponry. Because we are on the battlefield, and there are bullets flying, some symbolic, some literal and the life of the mind is a crucial place where the battle goes on.”

— Cornel West

223. “I think anytime we talk about transforming in capitalist society, we are talking about a process not a particular event so you can’t talk about a socialist revolution.”

— Cornel West

224. “We are a democracy and we don’t believe in just hunting down gangsters and killing them. We believe in trying to find the gangsters and bring them back for trial, and give them a trial under rule of law. That’s what democracies do.”

— Cornel West

225. “To me, healing means you have to recognize there is a wound and you try to understand what the sources of the wound are, which means you try to tell a story about how it came to be. So you have to engage in some historical interpretation.”

— Cornel West

226. “Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus – yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle.”

— Cornel West

227. “I would say you have to fight in the life of the mind as well as fight in the streets, as well as fight in the courts, as well as fight in congress and the White House. Every site is a sight of contestation.”

— Cornel West

228. “We have to be self-critical even in context that we might be critical of, even as we – our pieces appear in it.”

— Cornel West

229. “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. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.”

— Cornel West

230. “I’m not romanticizing black people, because we’ve got gangsters like everybody else.”

— Cornel West

231. “To be humble is to be so sure of one’s self and one’s mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one’s self and status. And, even more pointedly, to be humble is to revel in the accomplishments or potentials of others – especially those with whom one identifies and to whom one is linked organically.”

— Cornel West

232. “King never confined himself to being solely the leader of black America – even though the white press attempted to do so.”

— Cornel West

233. “Part of the problem is we had so far to go, given the deep homophobia in our society. But, the movement is very real. The movement is very real.”

— Cornel West

234. “It would just be nice if we had leaders in Washington who could unequivocally take a stand on behalf of democratic movements in other parts of the world. And even this is true for even Brother Barack Obama.”

— Cornel West

235. “There ought to be a robust, uninhibited conversation in black America with different black ideological perspectives.”

— Cornel West

236. “We’ve got the wrong vision, the wrong values, the wrong priority, and as the great prophetic figure Marian Edelman Wright puts it, we have been AWOL when it comes to poor people and poor children.”

— Cornel West

237. “Anytime two human beings find genuine pleasure, joy, and love, the stars smile and the universe is enriched.”

— Cornel West

238. “Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don’t think that the words are necessarily nullified. It’s just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.”

— Cornel West

239. “This market way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience.”

— Cornel West

240. “For me, music is in no way ornamental or decorative, it’s constitutive of who I am.”

— Cornel West

241. “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.”

— Cornel West

242. “The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.”

— Cornel West

243. “There used to be corporations that produced products. Now there are just banks that produce deals, hedge-fund-driven banks and derivatives and those things.”

— Cornel West

244. “Truth is fine. Absolutely.”

— Cornel West

245. “I was blessed to be part of a commercial, pushing for this energy bill, but we’ve been unsuccessful.”

— Cornel West

246. “Try to just be true to ourselves, whoever we are, but willing to grow, even as we’re true to ourselves.”

— Cornel West

247. “We are witnessing a rebellion. It’s beautiful to see the qty of protests and the scope and breadth of all colors, all genders, all sexual orientations, all ethnicities and all religious identities in the USA.”

— Cornel West

248. “When black America is on the move, America is on the move.”

— Cornel West

249. “We need to put strong Democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people.”

— Cornel West

250. “I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.”

— Cornel West