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

Cornel West

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

Bitterness Driven Soul
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
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
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
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
He who learns death unlearns slavery.
CORNEL WEST

Slavery Thrive Unlearn
confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder
CORNEL WEST

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

Certain Kind Stuff
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
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
When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots.
CORNEL WEST

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

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

Culture Hip Hop Rap
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 loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism–the idolatry of the 20th century.
CORNEL WEST

Century Form Tribalism
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
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
Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent.
CORNEL WEST

Jazz Music Need
Truth is fine. Absolutely.
CORNEL WEST

Absolute Fine Truth
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
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
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
CORNEL WEST

Believe Brother Gay

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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