Quotes by Cornel West

“We had a much deeper sense of community in 67 than we do in 97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because its not as if 67 was a time when things were so good.”

“A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.”

“If we had a whole wave of new leaders in the next five to seven years, black America would be a different place.”

“Who wants to be well-adjusted to injustice? What kind of human being do you want to be?”

“The Challenge of Race.”

“The problem is we need much more moral content.”

“The crisis in black America is threefold...economic...political...and spiritual.”

“[Such is] a deceptive cloak of racial consensus, ... The Pitfalls of Racial Reasoning.”

“More isolated, insulated, lonely, alienated, estranged black folk especially among the working class and working poor, but its true across the board and thats what is frightening.”

“Community affairs or human relations and even that would have been and few between.”

“I wish I was a rapper. There are certainly times when I wish I could just drop an album and channel all my ideas, anger, humor and energy into some music and be done with it.”

“In classical music, love is based on bitin -- imitation. Its not based on interpretation. A jazz musician, if he plays someone elses song, has a responsibility to make a distinct and original statement.”

“Frankly I love the word nigga. It is my favorite word in the English language because no other word incites more controversy today.”

“Hip hop is inherently political, the language is political. It uses language as a weapon -- not a weapon to violate or not a weapon to offend, but a weapon that pushes the envelope that provokes people, makes people think.”

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.

In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each others throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.

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.

We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.

..begin by talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another. Now part of this frustration is to be understood again in relation to structures and institutions. In the way in which our culture of consumption has promoted an addiction to stimulation - one that puts a premium on packaged and commodified stimulation. The market does this to convince us that our consumption keeps oiling the economy for it to reproduce itself. But the effect of this addiction to stimulation is an undermining, a waning of our ability for qualitatively rich relationships.

liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.