Cornel Love Quotes & Sayings

And when you love people, you hate the fact that they're being treated unfairly. You tell the truth. You sacrifice your popularity for integrity. There is a willingness to give your life back to the people given that, in the end, they basically gave it to you, because we are who we are because somebody loved us anyway. — Cornel West

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public. — Cornel West

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

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

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

When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain. — Cornel West

119When you bring together the national security state and the military-industrial complex, when you bring together the prison-industrial complex and all the profits that flow from it, when you bring together the corporate media multiplex that don't want to allow for serious dialogue ... and then, when you bring together the Wall Street oligarchs and the corporate plutocrats, and they tell any person or any group, 'If you speak the truth, we'll shoot you down like a dog and dehumanize you the way we did to dehumanize the brothers in Attica,' the only thing that will keep you going is you better have some love in your heart for the people. — Cornel West

There's a difference between just gaining access to a commodity as opposed to a spirit that allows us to live a life of love and justice, that when crisis and catastrophe hits you, that the biggest mansion in the world is not going to help you. If you don't have anybody who loves you, if you don't have any God who cares for you, that you're not going to have what it takes to move to the next stage in your life. — Cornel West

I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it's a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver's seat regarding their lives. — Cornel West

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 have some notions that have people conceiving of themselves as capable of changing the world. That's why, for me, the issues of self-love, self-respect and self-regard are preconditions for human agency and especially black agency, given the fact that we have been and are such a hated and despised people. — Cornel West

Songs: What if for the next three hundred years, we sang about love and justice (which has been defined by philosopher Cornel West as "what love looks like in public") as much as we've sung about sin and forgiveness over the last three hundred years? Imagine if every week God were praised and worshipped above all as the source and epitome of love. — Brian McLaren

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation
and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. 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. — 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

To be a Christian - a follower of Jesus Christ - is to love wisdom, love justice, and love freedom. — Cornel West

Drew Dellinger is one of the most creative, courageous and prophetic poets of his generation. I love his spirit. Don't miss him! — Cornel West

I had blackouts, fallen out, of course, the death threats, people showing up, putting guns to my wife's head with mask, and people having shot guns in the driveway, looking for me or announcing that I've already died before lectures and sending it through newspaper - sending it to newspaper columns they send my mother and so on. There's a real night side to my particular calling, which is try to bear witness to love and truth. — Cornel West

In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in the culture industries
television, radio, video, music. Like all Americans, African Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort. These images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values
love, care, service to others
handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward of self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America. — Cornel West

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice. — Cornel West

How does one undermine the framework of racial reasoning? By dismantling each pillar slowly and systematically. The fundamental aim of this undermining and dismantling is to replace racial reasoning with moral reasoning, to understand the black freedom struggle not as an affair of skin pigmentation and racial phenotype but rather as a matter of ethical principles and wise politics, and to combat the black nationalist attempt to subordinate the issues and interests of black women by linking mature black self-love and self-respect to egalitarian relations within and outside black communities. The failure of nerve of black leadership is its refusal to undermine and dismantle the framework of racial reasoning. — Cornel West

Hatred of injustice is not the same thing as a love for everyday people. — 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

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

Philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia; that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom. — Cornel West

To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

The love of wisdom is a way of life; that is to say, it's a set of practices that have to do with mustering the courage to think critically about ourselves, society, and the world; mustering the courage to empathize; the courage, I would say, to love; the courage to have compassion with others, especially the widow and the orphan, the fatherless and the motherless, poor and working peoples, gays and lesbians, and so forth - and the courage to hope. — 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

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

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

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

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

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'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

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

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. — Cornel West

Nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse. There is always a chance for conversion
a chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle ... Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care. Any disease of the soul must be conquered by a turning of one's soul. This turning is done through one's own affirmation of one's worth
an affirmation fueled by the concern of others. A love ethic must be at the center of a politics of conversion.
A love ethic has nothing to do with sentimental feelings or tribal connections. Rather it is a last attempt at generating a sense of agency among a downtrodden people. — Cornel West

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

I was a gangster when I was young. I had a Robin Hood mentality and tended to always want to support the weak against the strong, but sometimes it was cohesive and I really needed to fall in love with the power of education to find the right venue to express my rage. I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes. — 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

The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that 'justice is what love looks like in public.' I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy. — Naomi Klein

Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love. — Cornel West

That's why love is so inseparable from any talk about truth and death, because we know that love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love. — Cornel West