500 Quotes by Cornel West

We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.

Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?

It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're reading in the library, at home and so on, but you're intensely alive. In fact you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all.

When it comes to our precious poor children of all colors, maybe disproportionally in percentage black and white and red, but all colors, yellow as well as white, we need to push toward integrated schools.

I'd say, [writing memoir] not so much a model, but maybe to provide an insight, here or there, to help somebody come to terms with the dark corners of their own soul, to come to terms with the undecided, their own sense of self, and maybe help develop a capacity to love - to love wisdom, love justice.

To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all.

Frederick Douglas's agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it's spilt over for women's rights; it's split over for worker's rights and so forth.

Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it’s always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.

You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.