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You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth

Cornel West

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
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
Truth is fine. Absolutely.
CORNEL WEST

Absolute Fine Truth
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
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 loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism–the idolatry of the 20th century.
CORNEL WEST

Century Form Tribalism
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 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.
CORNEL WEST

Philosophy Understanding Way
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
Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
CORNEL WEST

Jazz Music Need
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
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
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

You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth

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You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth

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