500 Quotes by Cornel West

Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin’, because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways.

I don’t draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can’t stand white supremacy. I can’t stand male supremacy. I can’t stand imperial subjugation. I can’t stand homophobia.

And when I talk about love, I’m talking about something that’s great, though, brother. I’m talking about something that will sustain you.

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it’s ethically driven.

Part of the popularity with Louis Farrakhan has less to do with the content of his message and more to do with the form that he portrays himself – as being a free, black person who speaks what is on his mind with boldness and fearlessness. Who is willing to pay the consequences.

I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. I’ve never viewed them in any way as being separable.

We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz’s people and others, who say, you know what? We’re sophisticated economists but we’re concerned about poor and working people.

I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That’s why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don’t get out of hand.