black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

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 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

Idea Men Wise
confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder
CORNEL WEST

Form Murder Soul
I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism–the idolatry of the 20th century.
CORNEL WEST

Century Form Tribalism
I’m a Christian, but I’m not a puritan. I believe in pleasure and orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place, televisual pleasure has its place [in life].
CORNEL WEST

Believe Christian Intellectual
Going all the way back to Jeremiah Wright and Tavis Smiley and Van Jones and even Shirley Sherrod and maybe even Maxine Waters and Charles Rangel. We’re going to see what his [Barack Obama] response is.
CORNEL WEST

Smiley Water Way
Anytime I look at a president, I don’t care what color he is.
CORNEL WEST

Color Looks President
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

Country Holiday Our People Society
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

Differences Fundamentals Organization
Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
CORNEL WEST

Jazz Music Need
Truth is fine. Absolutely.
CORNEL WEST

Absolute Fine Truth
As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.
CORNEL WEST

Certain Kind Stuff
It’s true that in reading an interview, I have a little critique of the objectification of women in a [Playboy] magazine that is perceived to doing that.
CORNEL WEST

Littles Magazine Reading
We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
CORNEL WEST

Buying Pleasure Selling
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

Ghetto Police Racism
Martin Luther King’s legacy is never to be measured by bricks and mortar, but rather by the kind of lives that we live, and the kind of love and service that we render.
CORNEL WEST

Brick Kings Legacy Mortar
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

Entangled Falling Love

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Cornel West Quotes