Quotes from Cornel West

The Poverty Tour provided the opportunity to meet many people who had been living paycheck to paycheck even before the economic downturn. To so quickly slide from the great middle into the underworld of the poor validated our suspicions that perhaps these citizens never really were bona fide, middle class Americans. Indeed, some economists assert that the middle class evaporated decades ago.

I'm sure I've had my phone tapped for years, I don't think it's a crime against humanity they just ought to quit doing it, god damn it.

To be bad is good not simply because it subverts the language of the dominant white culture but also because it imposes a unique kind of order for young black men on their own distinctive chaos and solicits an attention that makes others pull back with some trepidation. This young black male style is a form of self-identification and resistance in a hostile culture; it also is an instance of machismo identity ready for violent encounters.

There are hundreds of political prisoners right now in America's jails who were so taken by Malcolm [X's} spirit that they became warriors and the powers that be understood them as warriors. They knew that a lot of these other middle-class [black] leaders were not warriors; they were professionals; they were careerists. But these warriors had callings, and they have paid an incalculable and immeasurable price in those cells.

Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus—yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle.

We must not allow our elected officials -many beholden to unaccountable corporate elites- to bastardize and pulverize the precious word democracy as they fail to respect and act on genuine democratic ideals

Humility is the fruit of inner security and wise maturity. To be humble is to be so sure of one's self and one's mission that one can forego calling excessive attention to one's self and status.

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, and the condition of being the truth is to transform your suffering with great creativity and compassion into forms and deeds that empower others to do likewise in their own ways.

We are witnessing a rebellion. It's beautiful to see the qty of protests and the scope and breadth of all colors, all genders, all sexual orientations, all ethnicities and all religious identities in the USA.

Since the end of the postwar economic boom, certain strategies have been intensified to stimulate consumption, especially strategies aimed at American youth that project sexual activity as instant fulfillment and violence as the locus of machismo identity. This market activity has contributed greatly to the disorientation and confusion of American youth, and those with less education and fewer opportunities bear the brunt of this cultural chaos.

The paradox of race in America is that our common destiny is more pronounced and imperiled precisely when our divisions are deeper.

racial reasoning discourages moral reasoning.

Being a hope is being in motion, on the move with body on the line, mind set on freedom, soul full of courage, and heart shot through with love. Being a hope is forging moral and spiritual fortitude, putting on intellectual armor, and being willing to live and die for the empowerment of the wretched of the earth.

Those notions of freedom, courage and joy would probably be the three fundamental motifs in my work, and I think that they are probably best enacted in the best of the black musical tradition.

I love her to this day. Love of her led me to leave her. But some other kind of love, whose dimensions were beyond both description and comprehension, was fueling my feelings and moving me in directions that I hadn't anticipated. I had found love. I had lost love. Love of my calling was pushing me on.

Our last and only hope is prophetic fightback—a moral and spiritual awakening that puts a premium on courageous truth telling and exemplary action by individuals and communities.

America is a grand example of the Biblical challenge: what does it profit an empire to gain the whole world and lose its soul?

I prefer to be hope rather than talk about hope.

Hence, for liberals, black people are to be included and integrated into our society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be well behaved and worthy of acceptance by our way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicaments of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life.

Life without meaning, hope, and love breeds a coldhearted, mean-spirited outlook that destroys the individual and others.

Yet an obsession with white racism often comes at the expense of more broadly based alliances to affect social change and borders on tribal mentality.

The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict; the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division.

That which fundamentally motivates one still dictates the terms of what one thinks and does—[…] one's eyes should be on the prize, not on the perpetrator of one's oppression.

This sense of political impotence-this experience of acquiescence without commitment'-yields three basic forms of politics: sporadic terrorism for impatient, angry and nihilistic radicals; professional reformism for comfortable, cultivated and concerned liberals; and evangelical nationalism for frightened, paranoid and accusatory conservatives.