500 Quotes by Cornel West

Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence.

Being a Christian is not a political orientation for the president, but he is a centrist.

I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like."

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

There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.

You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit.

I'm a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration - joy and pain - sit side by side.

Collaborating with the musical genius of our time in some ways with Prince himself - late, great Gerald Levert,all these are forms of singing education, what the Greeks call paideia,that deep education to get us to shift from superficial things to serious things, to shift from bling-bling to life and death to justice and pain and joy, those fundamental, elemental things that we must come to terms with as we make our moves from our mother's womb to the tomb.

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.