Cornel West Quotes

53 Sourced Quotes

Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day
owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope.

Cornel West
I focus on popular culture because I focus on those areas where black humanity is most powerfully expressed, where black people have been able to articulate their sense of the world in a profound manner. And I see this primarily in popular culture. Why not in highbrow culture? Because the access has been so difficult. Why not in more academic forms? Because academic exclusion has been the rule for so long for large numbers of black people that black culture, for me, becomes a search for where black people have left their imprint and fundamentally made a difference in terms of how certain art forms are understood. This is currently in popular culture. And it has been primarily in music, religion, visual arts and fashion.

Cornel West
Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.

Cornel West
From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?

Cornel West
Music at its best... is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us — beyond language — to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

Cornel West
To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America — this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' — needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.

Cornel West
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
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
As long as black people are viewed as "them," the burden falls on blacks to do all the "cultural" and "moral" work necessary for healthy race relations. The implication is that only certain Americans can define what it means to be American—and the rest must simply "fit in."

Cornel West
We have seen that there are two opposing tendencies in American democracy—toward imperialism and toward democratization—and we are in a period of intense battle between the two.

Cornel West
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
The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak - that gives it an existential emphasis.

Cornel West
Black people have always been in America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

Cornel West
Our politicians have sacrificed their principles on the altar of special interests; our corporate leaders have sacrificed their integrity on the altar of profits; and our media watchdogs have sacrificed the voice of dissent on the altar of audience competition.

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

Cornel West
The blues is not simply a music to titillate; it is a hard-fought way of life, and as such should unsettle and unnerve whites about the legacy of white supremacy.

Cornel West
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
The major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat—that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.... Without hope there can be no future, without meaning there can be no struggle.

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

Cornel West
The niggerization of black people tried to make black love a crime, black history a curse, black hope a joke, and black freedom a pipe dream

Cornel West
To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

Cornel West
When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.

Cornel West
I have always marveled at how such an unfree people as blacks in America created the freest forms in America, such as blues and jazz.

Cornel West
To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.

Cornel West
The courage to be is the most difficult thing for any human being.

Cornel West
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...

Cornel West
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
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
As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.

Cornel West