Cornel Quotes & Sayings

I'm a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys. — Cornel West

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

Those who came to the United States didn't realize they were white until they got here. They were told they were white. They had to learn they were white. An Irish peasant coming from British imperial abuse in Ireland during the potato famine in the 1840s, arrives in the United States. You ask him or her what they are. They say, "I am Irish." No, you're white. "What do you mean, I am white?" And they point me out. "Oh, I see what you mean. This is a strange land." — Cornel West

It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success. — Cornel West

Context shapes who you are. — Cornel West

The street is as diverse as any other sector, but in peoples' mind it gets appropriated as a black man who's tough. Trying to make it through by staying hard and phallocentric. To me, that is just an impoverished conception of what it is to be a black male. It doesn't do justice to my grandfather, my father, my brother - or just the black men I grew up with. — Cornel West

A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. — 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 black church is dormant, much of the community is dormant. If the black church is leaning toward the right, much of the community is leaning toward the right. If it is leaning in the left wing direction having repercussions. — Cornel West

The right wing can use anything, and we have to make it very clear and I make it very clear that my love for the president in terms of protecting him and respecting him but also correcting, now all three of those are crucial, and if I can do all three, then the right wing can use it whatever they want, and I'm just clear where I stand, over against them but also critical when the president leans toward the strong, rather than the weak. — Cornel West

Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people. — Cornel West

Confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder — Cornel West

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

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

King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens. — Cornel West

I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

I think the important thing to understand first and foremost about Michael Jackson is that he was the international emblem of the African American blues spiritual impulse that goes back through slavery - Jim Crow, Jane Crow, up to the present moment, through a Louis Armstrong, through a Ma Rainey, through a Bessie Smith, all the way to John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone. — Cornel West

When we think of globalization we are thinking in part of structures and institutions that have been developed over time and that have allowed us to become more interdependent and interrelated. But the development, the extraordinary development, of those structures and institutions has not fundamentally transformed our humanity. We are still those animals with fears and anxieties and insecurities in the face of death and dread and disappointment and disease. — Cornel West

You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth — Cornel West

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

We don't hear our president [Barack Obama] talking about the need for high-quality jobs for everybody, giving it priority, not just giving a speech in Detroit. That's fine, but speaking to Tim Geithner, speaking to Larry Summers. When are you going to make jobs, jobs, jobs a priority rather than Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street a priority? That's what I'm concerned about. — Cornel West

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

I am who I am because somebody loved me. — Dr. Cornel West

Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity. — Cornel West

The problem is we need much more moral content. — Cornel West

We look at the legacy of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker, Malcolm X and Martin King. We have, and part of the struggle now in the age of [Barack] Obama is how do we keep alive the legacy of Martin King? — Cornel West

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

I think markets are mechanisms that determine prices that are necessary for mass heterogenous populations, and markets do generate levels of technological innovation and productivity that is crucial. But when unregulated, they often generate levels of vast inequality and ugly isolation that makes it difficult for people to relate and connect with one another. — Cornel West

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? — Cornel West

Be willing to learn, because none of us know the truth — Cornel West

You can't move forward until you look back. — Cornel West

When it comes to our precious poor children of all colors, maybe disproportionally in percentage black and white and red, but all colors, yellow as well as white, we need to push toward integrated schools. — Cornel West

It's fashionable to be indifferent to other people's suffering — Cornel West

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

You can't talk about truth unless you talk about yourself. — Cornel West

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

There's a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde. — Cornel West

You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it. — Cornel West

And there has been no attempt to investigate it,' I said, 'to see what it really is?'

'Eh, Cornel,' said the coachman's wife, 'wha would investigate, as ye call it, a thing that nobody believes in? Ye would be the laughing-stock of a' the country-side, as my man says.'

'But you believe in it,' I said, turning upon her hastily. The woman was taken by surprise. She made a step backward out of my way.

'Lord, Cornel, how ye frichten a body! Me! there's awful strange things in this world. An unlearned person doesna ken what to think. But the minister and the gentry they just laugh in your face. Inquire into the thing that is not! Na, na, we just let it be.' ("The Open Door") — Mrs. Oliphant

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

There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely. — Cornel West

We must not allow our elected officials -many beholden to unaccountable corporate elites- to bastardize and pulverize the precious word democracy as they fail to respect and act on genuine democratic ideals — Cornel West

I'm a Christian. I believe that greatness has to do with the quality of love shown to the least of thy brethren and the quality of service to those who are catching hell. When you look at it in that sense, I'd say America has had great moments, but I wouldn't call it a great nation. I don't think there have been any great nations in the history of the world, because in every nation you find poor people being subjugated. So, I see the term "great nation" as a contradiction, as an oxymoron. — Cornel West

Black people have been working hard for decades. — Cornel West

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

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. — Cornel West

Like Richard Ellmann on James Joyce, Arnold Rampersad on Ralph Ellison is in a class of its own. His masterful and magisterial book is the most powerful and profound treatment of Ellison's undeniable artistic genius, deep personal flaws, and controversial political evolution. And he reveals an Ellison unbeknownst to all of us. From now on, all serious scholarship on Ellison must begin with Rampersad's instant and inimitable classic in literary biography. — Cornel West

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

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

I want to be a jazzman until the day I die. To help keep that motion, momentum and movement going, for myself, for my students, for the people who hear me. Oh sure, some days you look around at this country and look at the evidence and think, Oh Lord, don't look good. But you keep moving. You gotta keep moving. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples. — Cornel West

You're trying to just leave the world a little better. — Cornel West

American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows. — Cornel West

You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust. — Cornel West

I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness. — Cornel West

We're talking about a prison-industrial complex. We're talking about a war on drugs that's generating unprecedented levels of incarcerated folk. We're talking about dilapidated housing. We're talking about joblessness and underemployment. — Cornel West

If you can't have a good time and smile and relate to people across race and class, then the success that you have ultimately is just sounding brass and tinkling symbol. — Cornel West

The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history. — Cornel West

If our world is regulated by reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of Darwin; or reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of religious dogma; you end up being childishly anti-scientific, and childishly anti-religious, and you miss the very complex interaction [they share] — Cornel West

I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else. — Cornel West

So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex. — Cornel West

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

I'd say, [writing memoir] not so much a model, but maybe to provide an insight, here or there, to help somebody come to terms with the dark corners of their own soul, to come to terms with the undecided, their own sense of self, and maybe help develop a capacity to love - to love wisdom, love justice. — Cornel West

I am very concerned about the environment and psychological health of this beautiful planet. — Cornel Wilde

I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay. — Cornel West

Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope. — Cornel West

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up. — Cornel West

When you love poor people THAT MUCH, when you love 'working people' THAT MUCH, that makes you the freest man/woman in the country.
- Cornel West in explaining that Obama is A fulfillment of MLK's dream not THE fulfillment of MLK's dream — 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

The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It's been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it's been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it. — Cornel West

The powerful have no monopoly on greed, hatred, fear, or ignorance. — Cornel West

There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference. — Cornel West

You've got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you'll be able to love others. — Cornel West

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

Humility means two things. One, a capacity for self-criticism. . . . The second feature is allowing others to shine, affirming others, empowering and enabling others." - CORNEL WEST — John C. Maxwell

Profound music leads us beyond language ... to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence. — Cornel West

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

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

A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue. — Cornel West

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

I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I'm going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism 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

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

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

I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered. — Cornel West

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

The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago. — Cornel West

We need to put strong Democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people. — Cornel West

It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love. — Cornel West

I want to learn something from my atheistic brothers and sisters, even though I'm a Christian. I want to learn something from my right-wing brothers and sisters, even though I'm a progressive. I want to learn something from the elderly, even though I'm middle-aged or tilting toward the elderly. I want to learn especially something from the youth. That's why I spend a lot of time in hip-hop studios. — Cornel West

I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism
the idolatry of the 20th century. — Cornel West

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

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. — Cornel West

I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against. — Cornel West

I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions. — Cornel West

I treated her like a pair of gloves. When I was cold, I called her up. — Cornel Wilde

It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself. — Cornel West