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 WESTThere 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.
More Cornel West Quotes
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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)
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As human beings, everyone has stuff coming at them, and a certain kind of fear.
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I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism–the idolatry of the 20th century.
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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”. There’s a qualitative difference.
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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.
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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.
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We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
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Rage is fine as long as it doesn’t deteriorate into bitterness.
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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.
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Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.
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I don’t draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can’t stand white supremacy. I can’t stand male supremacy. I can’t stand imperial subjugation. I can’t stand homophobia.
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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.
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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].
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I’m actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.
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Isabel Wilkerson’s book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don’t miss it!
CORNEL WEST