Quotes from Cornel West

The blues aren't pessimistic. We're prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark.

I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.

As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.

We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.

When you socially neglect a people, when you economically abandon a people, when you transfer wealth from them to the well-to-do, what are a people going to do? They're going to respond with very sad forms of despair, and that's true for everybody - I don't care what color you are.

It is very difficult to sustain a high-quality relationship that has the kind of mutual intensity, that has a kind of mutual respect, without putting in time.

It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love.

The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.

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.

Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways.

A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.

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.

When you teach black people that they are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent, and as a result you defer to the white supremacist status quo, you rationalize your accommodation to the status quo, you lose your fire, you become much more tied to producing foliage, what appears to be the case.

I'm an old Coltrane disciple just like I'm a Christian.

There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.

We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters.

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.

The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they're on the road to freedom and that means they're gonna run up against the powers that be.

Part of the problem is we had so far to go, given the deep homophobia in our society. But, the movement is very real. The movement is very real.

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?

Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It's a form of spiritual emptiness.

There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There's a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas.