500 Quotes by Cornel West

You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It’s a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good.

Success is such a relative thing for me. I’m fundamentally a Christian which means that ultimately all of the penultimate titles and things you just had to wear with a loose garment. Really.

We’re all vanishing organisms and disappearing creatures in space and time – that death sentence in space in time that Kafka talked about with such profundity.

I’m a bluesman moving through a blues-soaked America, a blues-soaked world, a planet where catastrophe and celebration – joy and pain – sit side by side.

As long as you’re scared you’re on the plantation.

We are a democracy and we don’t believe in just hunting down gangsters and killing them. We believe in trying to find the gangsters and bring them back for trial, and give them a trial under rule of law. That’s what democracies do.

Racial reasoning conceals these presuppositions behind a deceptive cloak of racial consensus – yet racial reasoning is seductive because it invokes an undeniable history of racial abuse and racial struggle.

I’ve been blessed, I think, to have tremendous joy in my life in pursuing my vocation, my calling.

You’ve got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you’ll be able to love others.