Cornel West
Philosopher, public intellectual
Sayings by Cornel West
We are all in this together, or we are not in it at all.
The greatest act of courage is to love in a world of hate.
To be a radical is to go to the root of the problem.
The true revolution begins in the heart.
We must never allow comfort to compromise our conscience.
We're beings toward death, we're featherless, two-legged, linguistically-conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us.
I'm a jazzman in the life of the mind. I'm a bluesman in the world of ideas. I'm a participant.
A lot of folk who have lost faith in God it's a very healthy thing because the God they lost faith in was probably an idol anyway.
At our best. Now, I'm not romanticizing black people, because we've got gangsters like everybody else. [laughs] But oh, Lord, we got some great ones.
My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.
There's a certain rhythmic seduction to the word [nigger].
If the only alternative to fascism we produce is a corporate-driven, milquetoast, neoliberal Democratic Party, fascism will come to America. Let us be very clear. It's like a Weimar America.
You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it.
Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
Everybody's smiling while folks are getting crushed down here!
I feel as if I have been blessed to undergo a transformation from 'gangster' to 'redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.'
Idealism should be kept for what is ideal!
It's impossible to translate the issue of the greed of Wall Street into one demand, or two demands.
Calling Larry Summers 'the Ariel Sharon of higher education'.
I hate his lies. and his gangster neo-fascism. I don't hate brother Biden. I hate this hypocrisy. and I hate his milk those neoliberal. policy