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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.

Cornel West

Being a Christian is not a political orientation for the president, but he is a centrist.
CORNEL WEST

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

Certain Kind Stuff
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
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
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
We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.
CORNEL WEST

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

Slavery Thrive Unlearn
You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth
CORNEL WEST

Speak Suffering Want
Anytime I look at a president, I don’t care what color he is.
CORNEL WEST

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

Bitterness Driven Soul
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
Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.
CORNEL WEST

Culture Hip Hop Rap
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
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
Interrogate yours hidden assumptions
CORNEL WEST

Assumption Hidden Interrogate
When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.
CORNEL WEST

Think Thinking Value Yourself
Rage is fine as long as it doesn’t deteriorate into bitterness.
CORNEL WEST

Bitterness Long Rage
Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
CORNEL WEST

Jazz Music Need
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
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
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
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

Belief Difference Strong

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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