Welcome to our collection of quotes by Cornel West. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Cornel West
Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953) is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, actor, and public intellectual.
The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness". A socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the Black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism. Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters (2004).
West is an outspoken voice in left-wing politics in the United States. He has held professorships and fellowships at Harvard University, Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, Princeton University, Dartmouth College, Pepperdine University, and the University of Paris during his career. He is also a frequent commentator on politics and social issues in many media outlets.
From 2010 through 2013, West co-hosted a radio program with Tavis Smiley, called Smiley and West. He has also been featured in several documentaries, and made appearances in Hollywood films such as The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, providing commentary for both films. West has also made several spoken word and hip hop albums, and due to his work, has been named MTV's Artist of the Week. West co-hosts a podcast, The Tight Rope, with Tricia Rose. He is additionally a frequent conversation partner with his friend Robert P. George, a prominent conservative intellectual, with the two often speaking together at colleges and universities on the meaning of liberal arts education, free speech, and civil dialogue. In 2020, he was listed by Prospect as the fourth-greatest thinker for the COVID-19 era.
If they think they have issues with the president not doing enough for the poor now, wait and see what happens if the opposition takes office. Then they would really need a poverty tour.
Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture or civilization ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature.
There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.
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.
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.
When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.
None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.
This market way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience.
There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.
If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.
Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall.
It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.
We have to recognize that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.
I have nothing against rich brothers and sisters. Pray for 'em every day. But callousness and indifference, greed and avarice is something that's shot through all of us.
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.
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.
None of us alone can save the nation or the world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so. (p. 109).
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.
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.
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.
All individuals have the same value, not to be determined by market price. They're made in the image and likeness of God.
It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're reading in the library, at home and so on, but you're intensely alive. In fact you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.
We live in a world where people are fearful of extremism, but Martin Luther King would say he was always trying to keep the flow of love in place. In that sense, he turned the world on its head.
Certainly Martin Luther King, in the mainstream perception of him, had a dream. Yes, he did. But the question becomes, what was that dream? It wasn't the American Dream. It was a dream that all human beings, especially poor and working people, be treated with dignity.
The question is really how do we think seriously about this mechanism called a market. It ought to be determining not values but prices.
I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.
The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.
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.
I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.
Now, myself, I'm not a pacifist at all. I believe in just war. I would have joined the spirit of the nation to fight against apartheid.
The blues aren't pessimistic. We're prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.
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.
We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.
It's never a question of skin pigmentation. It's never a question of just culture or sexual orientation or civilization. It's what kind of human being you're going to choose to be from your mama's womb to the tomb and what kind of legacy will you leave.
The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.
I was blessed to be part of a commercial, pushing for this energy bill, but we've been unsuccessful.
Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.
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.
This is what it is for Asians to be part of -- support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it's a matter of justice.
Affirmative action is something that I think is very crucial and necessary.
For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites.
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.
Music is the very cement that has not just held the black community together but holds black selves together in a fundamental sense.
If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf. And when you call for help, and that golden calf can't respond, you go under.
We are intent on building a movement. The next step is grassroots town meetings. We must keep alive the dialogue around the covenants.
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.
I don't believe in the elimination of evil. But I believe in fightin' against evil.
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.
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.
I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness.
If you are always trying to do something for a cause bigger than you -- connected with serving others -- then it is hard to be guilty.
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.
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.
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.
In the practice of radical love, you are embracing human beings across the board, but you do give a preference -- very much like Jesus -- to the least of these, to the weak, to the vulnerable. That includes poor whites and poor browns, as well as the poor in black ghettos.
The black church often has reinforced certain self images that are damaging to black peoples' beauty, black peoples' confidence.
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.
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.
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.
You don't begin by dehumanizing those who are dehumanizing you, because it contributes to the cycle of dehumanization in the world.
Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?
I think that when we talk about education I was also blessed to talk with my dear brother Arne Duncan. I had never met him, the secretary of Education. We had a wonderful talk. And I had told him quite explicitly education is a right, it's not a race to the top.
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.
The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak -- that gives it an existential emphasis.
It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield.
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?
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.
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.
The black agenda, from Frederick Douglas to Ida B. Wells to Martin King, has always been the most broad, deep, inclusive, embracing agenda of the nation.
If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf.
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.
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.
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.
If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.
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.
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?
The interesting thing for me is, if that had been a left-wing person raising questions, President Obama probably would have expressed his anger. Because Obama really does get upset about progressives.
I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I've never viewed them in any way as being separable.
A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.