500 Quotes by Cornel West

For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane’s a poet of tempo.

You can’t talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it’s precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly.

Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that’s being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.

I’m not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of “just war” that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that’s the last, last resort.

A philosopher’s a lover of wisdom.

Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It’s a form of spiritual emptiness.

The rage is still there but I found the right kind of channel, because it’s tied to a love, it’s tied to a struggle for justice. And most importantly, for me, it’s tied to a recognition that I am a cracked vessel.

The important thing for me as an educator is how to – how do we unsettle the minds and touch the souls of significant numbers of young people who don’t read texts or don’t read my texts.

I’m a bluesman, which means that I put an emphasis on the minor keys.