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Profound music leads us beyond language…to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

Cornel West

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

Certain Kind Stuff
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
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
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
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
You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
CORNEL WEST

Speak Suffering Want
Interrogate yours hidden assumptions
CORNEL WEST

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

Bitterness Driven Soul
You can’t have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
CORNEL WEST

High Quality Trust Without
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 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
Truth is fine. Absolutely.
CORNEL WEST

Absolute Fine Truth
confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder
CORNEL WEST

Form Murder Soul
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
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

Country People Rights
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 WEST

Philosophy Understanding Way
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

Book Miss People
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
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.
CORNEL WEST

People Sight White
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

Christian Land Name
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
Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
CORNEL WEST

Jazz Music Need
I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism–the idolatry of the 20th century.
CORNEL WEST

Century Form Tribalism
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
We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.
CORNEL WEST

Kindness Radical Sweetness
When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.
CORNEL WEST

Think Thinking Value Yourself

Profound music leads us beyond language…to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

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Profound music leads us beyond language…to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

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Popular Authors

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