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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?

Cornel West

Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it’s ethically driven.
CORNEL WEST

Bitterness Driven Soul
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

Inspirational Loyalty Relationship
Death is always a constant possibility and probability and of course an inevitability, as well.
CORNEL WEST

Constant Possibility Probability
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
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
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
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

Democracy Majority Rights
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
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
We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.
CORNEL WEST

Kindness Radical Sweetness
He who learns death unlearns slavery.
CORNEL WEST

Slavery Thrive Unlearn
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.
CORNEL WEST

Differences Successful Year
Hey, you got something going here. I think we’ve got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.
CORNEL WEST

Hey People Thinking
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
Rage is fine as long as it doesn’t deteriorate into bitterness.
CORNEL WEST

Bitterness Long Rage
Profound music leads us beyond language…to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.
CORNEL WEST

Dark Profound Root

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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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?

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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