"You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth"
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Quote collection
Cornel West quotes (page 2 of 18)
353 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go."
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"To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away."
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"To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love."
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"To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak."
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"It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself."
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"Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity."
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"The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark."
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"You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it."
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"Music is what we need when language fails us, but we cannot remain silent."
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"I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism--the idolatry of the 20th century."
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"Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street."
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"We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness."
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"When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots."
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"You don't begin by dehumanizing those who are dehumanizing you, because it contributes to the cycle of dehumanization in the world."
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"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."
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"If you've got on the one hand death, dogmatism, domination, and on the other you've got desire in the face of death, dialogue in the face of dogmatism, democracy in the face of domination, then philosophy itself becomes a critical disposition of wrestling with desire in the face of death, wrestling with dialogue in the face of dogmatism, and wrestling with democracy, trying to keep alive a very fragile democratic experiment."
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"Market moralities and mentalities-- fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost-- yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation."
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"The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom."
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"You keep folks so intimidated. You can give them money, access, but they're still scared. And as long as you're scared, you're on the plantation."
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