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.
CORNEL WESTHey, you got something going here. I think we’ve got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.
More Cornel West Quotes
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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!
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He who learns death unlearns slavery.
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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.
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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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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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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?
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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
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Rage is fine as long as it doesn’t deteriorate into bitterness.
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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.
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When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.
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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 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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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.
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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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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







