500 Quotes by Cornel West

Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience ... centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. ... The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.

I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it's a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver's seat regarding their lives.

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.

You can't move forward until you look back.

In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people.

Philosophy is in fact a quest for wisdom based in sophia; that quest for wisdom has everything to do with a love of wisdom.

There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.

Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don't miss it!

When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right, you just decide to go down fighting. Period.