500 Quotes by Cornel West

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.

You can’t move forward until you look back.

Homophobia is very, very difficult to root out, to extricate. That’s why we have to bear witness. That’s why we have to be so public about it, and that’s why we can’t just play footsie with it.

You’re trying to just leave the world a little better.

It’s so easy to begin to demonize someone you think is so far removed and as the demonization begins to expand, it ends up being everybody but your friends. After a while everybody else but you. That is a slippery slope that is so easy to slide down, and that’s what is dangerous.

The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It’s been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it’s been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it.

You can’t lead the people if you don’t love the people. You can’t save the people if you don’t serve the people.

We have to be self-critical even in context that we might be critical of, even as we – our pieces appear in it.

You’re going to end up with a government in Egypt that is concerned about the precious Palestinians, the same way we ought to be concerned about both precious Palestinians and precious Jews.