500 Quotes by Cornel West

The aim is not for me to be right. The aim is to make sure that we keep the focus on the people who are suffering. That’s what we’re here for.

Where there is no vital community to hold up precious ethical and religious ideals, there can be no coming to a moral commitment – only personal accomplishment is applauded.

We are witnessing a rebellion. It’s beautiful to see the qty of protests and the scope and breadth of all colors, all genders, all sexual orientations, all ethnicities and all religious identities in the USA.

The most dangerous thing in American society is a self-respecting and self-loving black person, because they’re on the road to freedom and that means they’re gonna run up against the powers that be.

There’s a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde.

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. The blues started off in some field, some plantation, in some mind, in some imagination, in some heart. The blues blew over to the next plantation, and then the next state. The blues went south to north, got electrified and even sanctified. The blues got mixed up with jazz and gospel and rock and roll.

The conversation with the dead is one of the great pleasures of life. Somebody who is sitting reading Chekhov, Beckett, reading Toni Morrison – you are not in any way dead, in many ways you are intensely alive.

The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom – not cause or origin – of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact, he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy – all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity.

I’m not romanticizing black people, because we’ve got gangsters like everybody else.