Quotes from Cornel West

Justice is what love looks like in public.

And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you.

Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.

You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.

There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.

Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice.

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.

When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain.

I'm black, so, you know, I'm again with black folk, but it's a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices.

Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher - for any human being, I think, in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.

I tend to be one who just speaks from my soul, and so what comes out sometimes is rather harsh. In that sense, I'm very much a part of the tradition of a Frederick Douglass or a Malcolm X who used hyperbolic language at times to bring attention to the state of emergency.

Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice.

One of the things I love most about Martin Luther King is that he was willing to sacrifice his popularity in favor of his integrity. He was an honest man, and he would tell the truth.

When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.

Truth is fine. Absolutely.

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.

Our problem is that we don't have enough people in America, including black people, who are progressive and willing to sacrifice their popularity in order to tell the truth.

I have nothing against rich brothers and sisters. Pray for 'em every day. But callousness and indifference, greed and avarice is something that's shot through all of us.

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.

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.

Barack Obama commits war crimes - Somalia, Yemen. He commits war crimes in Pakistan, Afghanistan. Martin Luther King Jr. tried to keep a spotlight on war crimes, to keep track of the innocents killed... There is a major clash.

Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.

I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions.