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Cornel West Quotes

Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, author, public intellectual, and prominent member of the Democratic Socialists of America. West is an outspoken voice in American leftist politics, and as such has been critical of members of the Democratic Party, including former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. He has held professorships at Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Union Theological Seminary, 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. He has also been portrayed on Saturday Night Live by Kenan Thompson.

The son 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." Styling himself as a radical democrat 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 and Democracy Matters .

✵ 2. June 1953  •  Other names 康乃爾·韋斯特, 코넬 웨스트, Քորնել Ուեսթ
Cornel West photo

Works

Race Matters
Race Matters
Cornel West
The Future of the Race
Cornel West: 28 quotes8 likes

Famous Cornel West Quotes

“We’re beings toward death, we’re … two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms.”

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

“Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent.”

Cornel West

Source: Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

“I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”

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

Source: The Cornel West Reader

“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

Source: Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

Cornel West Quotes about people

“Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)”

Cornel West book Race Matters

Source: Race Matters

“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

Source: Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom (2008); also on "The Way I See It" Starbucks Coffee Cup #284

“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."”

Cornel West

There's a qualitative difference.
Speech in San Francisco: Democracy Matters (1 October 2004)

“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

"The Role of Law in Progressive Politics" in Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (1993)

“Free-market fundamentalism trivializes the concern for public interest. It puts fear and insecurity in the hearts of anxiety-ridden workers. It also makes money-driven, poll-obsessed elected officials deferential to corporate goals of profit – often at the cost of the common good. … The free-market fundamentalism that prevails in the United States today promotes the pervasive sleepwalking of the populace. People see that the false prophets are handsomely rewarded — with money, status and access to more power. … We are experiencing the sad gangsterization of America — an unbridled grasp at power, wealth and status.”

Cornel West

"Cornel West: Democracy Matters" in The Globalist (24 January 2005) https://web.archive.org/web/20101203073821/http://www.theglobalist.com/StoryId.aspx?StoryId=4262

“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

"Cornel West interviewed by bell hooks" in Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991)

Cornel West Quotes about love

“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

Source: The Cornel West Reader

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

Cornel West

Brother West (2009), p. 232

“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

Cornel West Quotes

“You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth”

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. (p. 102)”

Cornel West book Race Matters

Source: Race Matters

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

Cornel West

Source: Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir

“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)”

Cornel West book Race Matters

Source: Race Matters

“You can't really move forward until you look back.

[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]”

Cornel West

“In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle”

Cornel West

Source: The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto

“The Enlightenment worldview held by Du Bois is ultimately inadequate, and, in many ways, antiquated, for our time. The tragic plight and absurd predicament of Africans here and abroad requires a more profound interpretation of the human condition — one that goes beyond the false dichotomies of expert knowledge vs. mass ignorance, individual autonomy vs. dogmatic authority, and self-mastery vs. intolerant tradition.”

Cornel West book The Future of the Race

The Future of the Race (1997) by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Cornel West, p. 64

“The rule of Big Money and its attendant culture of cupidity and mendacity has so poisoned our hearts, minds and souls that a dominant self-righteous neoliberal soulcraft of smartness, dollars and bombs thrives with little opposition.”

Cornel West

"America is spiritually bankrupt. We must fight back together." The Guardian, January 14, 2018 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jan/14/america-is-spiritually-bankrupt-we-must-fight-back-together

“To many, our democratic system seems so broken that they have simply lost faith that their participation could really matter. The politics of self-interest and catering to narrow special interests is so dominant that so many ask themselves: Why vote? … The political discourse is so formulaic, so tailored into poll-driven, focus-group-approved slogans that don't really say anything substantive or strike at the core of our lived experience.”

Cornel West

"Cornel West: Democracy Matters" in The Globalist (24 January 2005)

“Analytical philosophy was very interesting. It always struck me as being very interesting and full of tremendous intellectual curiosities. It is wonderful to see the mind at work in such an intense manner, but, for me, it was still too far removed from my own issues.”

Cornel West

Interview in African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations (1998) edited by George Yancy, p. 35

“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

Lecture in New Haven, On Constructed Rights (28 February 2013)

“To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.”

Cornel West

"Chekhov, Coltrane, and Democracy: Interview by David Lionel Smith." in The Cornel West Reader (1998)

“The authority of science … promotes and encourages the activity of observing, comparing, measuring and ordering the physical characteristics of human bodies.… Cartesian epistemology and classical ideals produced forms of rationality, scientificity and objectivity that, though efficacious in the quest for truth and knowledge, prohibited the intelligibility and legitimacy of black equality…. In fact, to "think" such an idea was to be deemed irrational, barbaric or mad.”

Cornel West

Prophesy Deliverance! (2002)

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