"To be great in our times too often means to have great prosperity and no moral magnanimity at all."
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Quote collection
Cornel West quotes (page 11 of 18)
353 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher - for any human being, I think, in the end. Courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope."
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"I had blackouts, fallen out, of course, the death threats, people showing up, putting guns to my wife's head with mask, and people having shot guns in the driveway, looking for me or announcing that I've already died before lectures and sending it through newspaper - sending it to newspaper columns they send my mother and so on. There's a real night side to my particular calling, which is try to bear witness to love and truth."
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"Martin Luther King wanted to be morally consistent and speak out against various things that were wrong, not just racism."
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"It's clear that he was incredibly courageous in his critique of white supremacy, wealth inequality, and imperial power as it relates to war in particular. But it's easy to deodorize Martin King, to sanitize or sterilize him. And I simply want to reveal his radical love and his radical analysis as what they really were."
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"It's true that you might be socially isolated because you're reading in the library, at home and so on, but you're intensely alive. In fact you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets of New York in crowds, with no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all."
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"For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane's a poet of tempo."
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"I think, Tom Friedman is right, and I think that we have to - we have to have a serious public dialogue to try to shift public policy in that regard."
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"I think nonviolence and the mediation of conflict by means of respecting civility must be promoted. But being the kind of beings we [peoplep] are - wrestling with greed, and wrestling with fears and security, anxieties, wrestling with hatred that's shot through all of us - wars are here to stay."
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"Be willing to learn, because none of us know the truth"
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"I would say you have to fight in the life of the mind as well as fight in the streets, as well as fight in the courts, as well as fight in congress and the White House. Every site is a sight of contestation."
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"It takes unbelievable spiritual courage, moral fortitude, to engage in militant nonviolence."
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"Martin Luther King's legacy is never to be measured by bricks and mortar, but rather by the kind of lives that we live, and the kind of love and service that we render."
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"I don't know of a great artist who did not sacrifice and thereby have to wrestle with the depths of loneliness and sadness."
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"I think that in a certain sense, we're concerned about the same issues. How do you accent the progressive, the prophetic, those things that are critical of all forms of injustice, all forms of bigotry, all forms of dehumanizing other people, and yet still allow for a certain kind of flow, linguistic flow, certain kinds of melodies and harmonies in the samplings that take place?"
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"The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace."
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"confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder"
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"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."
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"When you love poor people THAT MUCH, when you love 'working people' THAT MUCH, that makes you the freest man/woman in the country." - Cornel West in explaining that Obama is A fulfillment of MLK's dream not THE fulfillment of MLK's dream"
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"I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts."
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