Cornel West Quotes

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Cornel West

Profession : Educator

Birth : June 2, 1953

Neofascism in the United States takes the form of big money, big banks, big corporations, tied to xenophobic scapegoating of the vulnerable, like Mexicans and Muslims and women and black folk, and militaristic policies abroad, with strongman, charismatic, autocratic personality, and that's what Donald Trump is.

Cornel West

Fire really means a certain kind of burning in the soul that one can no longer tolerate when one is pushed against a wall.

Cornel West

It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands.

Cornel West

I'm an old Coltrane disciple just like I'm a Christian.

Cornel West

We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions.

Cornel West

If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf. And when you call for help, and that golden calf can't respond, you go under.

Cornel West

Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom.

Cornel West

A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all.

Cornel West

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.

Cornel West

Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.

Cornel West

Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is.

Cornel West

Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a man of peace. He was a radical pacifist, and so he was against war across the board.

Cornel West

I have nothing against rich brothers and sisters. Pray for 'em every day. But callousness and indifference, greed and avarice is something that's shot through all of us.

Cornel West

Black people have been working hard for decades.

Cornel West

We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.

Cornel West

I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions.

Cornel West

There has certainly been ugly, right-wing hatred targeting Barack Obama.

Cornel West

We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.

Cornel West

When you teach black people that they are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent, and as a result you defer to the white supremacist status quo, you rationalize your accommodation to the status quo, you lose your fire, you become much more tied to producing foliage, what appears to be the case.

Cornel West

My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.

Cornel West