Cornel West Short Quotes

25 Sourced Quotes

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Faith is stepping out on nothing and landing on something.

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

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

Cornel West
I must feel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire.

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

Cornel West
To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.

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

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

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

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

Cornel West
Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

Cornel West
You can't lead the people if you don't love the people, and you can't save the people if you won't serve the people.

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
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.

Cornel West
Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority.

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
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
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
We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.

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
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
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 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
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.

Cornel West
Market moralities and mentalities — fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost — yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness.

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
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