500 Quotes by Cornel West

And as a Christian, I got something the world didn’t give me, the world can’t take away, so I find joy that can never be reduced to anything.

Hey, you got something going here. I think we’ve got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.

For most of the history of the American empire, government has been a tool for preserving and furthering the power and might of white male corporate elites...

I don’t know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness.

It’s a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what’s right and what’s good. It’s just stuck, and they can’t get it out because there’s too much greed. There’s too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success.

It’s just that the churches have been sleeping for a long time. A lot of people argue that the churches are even dead. I don’t believe they’re dead, but they’ve been sleeping, but they, I hope, will wake up, and that’s one of my tasks is to make sure they wake up as much as they do before I die.

Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don’t think that the words are necessarily nullified. It’s just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of.

Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That’s true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future.

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak – that gives it an existential emphasis.