110+ Cornel West Quotes On Education, Justice And Hope

Cornel West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, author, and public intellectual. He is a professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and holds the title of Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. West is known for his combination of political activism with his ideas of philosophy and religious studies, which have been heavily influenced by the African-American experience. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Cornel West on education, leadership, love.

Top 10 Cornel West Quotes

1. There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.
2. Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public
3. Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope.
4. Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.
5. The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration.
6. We have to recognise that there cannot be relationships unless there is commitment, unless there is loyalty, unless there is love, patience, persistence.
7. A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.
8. The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice.
9. Justice is what love looks like in public.
10. If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.

Cornel West Short Quotes

• Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity.
• I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism--the idolatry of the 20th century.
• We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.
• If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf.
• Wealth inequality has increased.
• We can't have a freedom struggle without free choice.
• The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak - that gives it an existential emphasis.
• You can't have a high-quality relationship without time and without trust.
• I like to be multi-contextual, which is much more important than being multicultural.
• There's a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde.

Cornel West Quotes About Education

You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good. — 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

The important thing for me as an educator is how to - how do we unsettle the minds and touch the souls of significant numbers of young people who don't read texts or don't read my texts. — Cornel West

Education is soul crafting. — Cornel West

I think that when we talk about education I was also blessed to talk with my dear brother Arne Duncan. I had never met him, the secretary of Education. We had a wonderful talk. And I had told him quite explicitly education is a right, it's not a race to the top. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About Love

To get up in the morning & do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love. — Cornel West

One of the things I love most about Martin Luther King is that he was willing to sacrifice his popularity in favor of his integrity. He was an honest man, and he would tell the truth. — Cornel West

I love my gay brothers. I love my lesbian sisters. I love my transvestite, my gender-bending folk. For me, it's a matter of embracing their humanity, allowing them to choose in such a way that they are in the driver's seat regarding their lives. — Cornel West

It's no accident that most of the great black spokespersons and leaders understood the centrality of self-affirmation, self-respect and self-love. — 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

In the practice of radical love, you are embracing human beings across the board, but you do give a preference - very much like Jesus - to the least of these, to the weak, to the vulnerable. That includes poor whites and poor browns, as well as the poor in black ghettos. — Cornel West

I'm black, so, you know, I'm again with black folk, but it's a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices. — Cornel West

I have tried to be a man of letters in love with ideas in order to be a wiser and more loving person, hoping to leave the world just a little better than I found it. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

When you love people, you give them a priority. You have a sense of urgency about their pain. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About Justice

Reelection ought not to be the primary preoccupation of any politician. It ought to be standing up for truth and justice. — Cornel West

Greatness is telling the truth & being courageous in pursuit of justice. The worst thing you could tell young people is to be successful but become well-adjusted to an unjust status quo as opposed to being great & being maladjusted to an unjust status quo. — Cornel West

Martin King was fundamentally committed to the least of these [poor, working people]. Of course, he was a Christian soldier for justice from the 25th chapter of Matthew. — Cornel West

Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day owing to our commitment to justice, love, and hope. — Cornel West

To be human you must bear witness to justice. — Cornel West

This is what it is for Asians to be part of - support affirmative action, even though it may be against their interest, but they feel it's a matter of justice. — Cornel West

The rage is still there but I found the right kind of channel, because it's tied to a love, it's tied to a struggle for justice. And most importantly, for me, it's tied to a recognition that I am a cracked vessel. — Cornel West

For me the prophetic has to do with mustering the courage to love, to empathize, to exercise compassion, and to be committed to justice. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About Hope

The blues aren’t pessimistic. We’re prisoners of hope but we tell the truth and the truth is dark. — Cornel West

I certainly support the right of the gay brothers and sisters to come together. I believe true love can take a number of different forms. If they choose to be married that's fine, but the important thing is I hope they find love — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

It's just that the churches have been sleeping for a long time. A lot of people argue that the churches are even dead. I don't believe they're dead, but they've been sleeping, but they, I hope, will wake up, and that's one of my tasks is to make sure they wake up as much as they do before I die. — Cornel West

As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. — Cornel West

I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About Inspiring

To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies. — Cornel West

Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land. — Cornel West

There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About Engaging

Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"-- they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108) — Cornel West

It takes unbelievable spiritual courage, moral fortitude, to engage in militant nonviolence. — Cornel West

Once you begin to talk about wealth inequality, especially as it relates to corporations and big banks, or engage in an indictment of U.S. foreign policy, you are really getting at the center of a society that is very fearful of that kind of critique. — Cornel West

To me, healing means you have to recognize there is a wound and you try to understand what the sources of the wound are, which means you try to tell a story about how it came to be. So you have to engage in some historical interpretation. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About People

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. — Cornel West

The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom. — Cornel West

It's a spiritual malnutrition tied to a moral constipation, where people have a sense of what's right and what's good. It's just stuck, and they can't get it out because there's too much greed. There's too much obsession with reputation and addiction to narrow conceptions of success. — Cornel West

Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature. — Cornel West

There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three. — Cornel West

I don't draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can't stand white supremacy. I can't stand male supremacy. I can't stand imperial subjugation. I can't stand homophobia. — Cornel West

We live in a predatory capitalist society in which everything is for sale. Everybody is for sale, so there is ubiquitous commodification - be it of music, food, people, or parking meters. — Cornel West

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up. — Cornel West

I remind young people everywhere I go, one of the worst things the older generation did was to tell them for twenty-five years "Be successful, be successful, be successful" as opposed to "Be great, be great, be great". There's a qualitative difference. — Cornel West

Certainly Martin Luther King, in the mainstream perception of him, had a dream. Yes, he did. But the question becomes, what was that dream? It wasn't the American Dream. It was a dream that all human beings, especially poor and working people, be treated with dignity. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About Poor

In situations of sparse resources along with degraded self-images and depoliticized sensibilities, one avenue for poor people is in existential rebellion and anarchic expression. The capacity to produce social chaos is the last resort of desperate people. — Cornel West

The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people. — Cornel West

Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth. — Cornel West

When it comes to our precious poor children of all colors, maybe disproportionally in percentage black and white and red, but all colors, yellow as well as white, we need to push toward integrated schools. — Cornel West

Martin Luther King would celebrate the symbolic status (of having a black president), but he would examine what the real substance was. And if he saw that poor and working people were not at the center of public policy, he would be deeply, deeply upset. — Cornel West

Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity. — Cornel West

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 — 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

Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal. — Cornel West

Hey, you got something going here. I think we've got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About Black

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

There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that. — Cornel West

The black agenda, from Frederick Douglas to Ida B. Wells to Martin King, has always been the most broad, deep, inclusive, embracing agenda of the nation. — Cornel West

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse. — Cornel West

Frederick Douglas's agenda was an agenda, not for black people to get out of slavery. It was for America to become a better democracy. And it's spilt over for women's rights; it's split over for worker's rights and so forth. — 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

Part of the popularity with Louis Farrakhan has less to do with the content of his message and more to do with the form that he portrays himself - as being a free, black person who speaks what is on his mind with boldness and fearlessness. Who is willing to pay the consequences. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex. — Cornel West

American mainstream is obsessed with black creative genius - be it music, walk, style - but at the same time puts a low priority on the black social misery which is the very context out of which that creativity flows. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About Working

There is no organizations and institutions that are worthwhile in terms of fighting for and dying for unless there is some individual integrity and character and virtue that is at work within various individuals in those institutions especially their leaders. — Cornel West

The problem is not just affirmative action, though. The problem is poor people, working people and their children, and affirmative action for the most part doesn't even apply to them. — Cornel West

The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It's been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it's been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it. — Cornel West

The most important assets we have are our bodies and our energy which can be put to good use as resources in political activism for poor and working people. — Cornel West

Martin Luther King was not a Marxist or a communist, but his radical love leads him to put poor and working people at the center. — Cornel West

We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics. — Cornel West

Black people have been working hard for decades. — Cornel West

We need to put strong Democratic pressure on President Obama in the name of poor and working people. — Cornel West

Michael Jackson was part of that tremendous wave in the ocean of human expression and it happened to be located first and foremost in Gary, Indiana, working class. — Cornel West

Cornel West Quotes About President

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

The interesting thing for me is, if that had been a left-wing person raising questions, [President Obama] probably would have expressed his anger. Because Obama really does get upset about progressives. — Cornel West

If they think they have issues with the president not doing enough for the poor now, wait and see what happens if the opposition takes office. Then they would really need a poverty tour. — Cornel West

I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered. — Cornel West

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

Being a Christian is not a political orientation for the president, but he is a centrist. — Cornel West

I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like." — Cornel West

Cornel West Famous Quotes And Sayings

You have to have a habitual vision of greatness ... you have to believe in fact that you will refuse to settle for mediocrity. You won't confuse your financial security with your personal integrity, you won't confuse your success with your greatness or your prosperity with your magnanimity ... believe in fact that living is connected to giving. — Cornel West

It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself. — Cornel West

You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it. — Cornel West

We are intent on building a movement. The next step is grassroots town meetings. We must keep alive the dialogue around the covenants. — Cornel West

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. — Cornel West

White supremacy is so deep-seated that it's hard to see it eliminated. But we could definitely push it back. — Cornel West

Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it. — Cornel West

King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens. — Cornel West

Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists. — Cornel West

Christians got a lot of work to do. But, the spirit of Dorothy Day is alive. Martin Luther King is still alive. Malcolm X and the prophetic Islamic tradition is still alive. We can't lose sight of those prophetic religious folk who, even given their kin in the same tradition, says, you all are wrong on this, but we're still in the same tradition. — Cornel West

It is very difficult to sustain a high-quality relationship that has the kind of mutual intensity, that has a kind of mutual respect, without putting in time. — Cornel West

There are various forms of weaponry, intellectual weaponry, spiritual weaponry, political weaponry, economic weaponry. Because we are on the battlefield, and there are bullets flying, some symbolic, some literal and the life of the mind is a crucial place where the battle goes on. — Cornel West

I believe that all of us have gangster proclivities and greedy orientations that need accountability. That's why democracies are necessary. We have to have institutions to try to curtail the use of arbitrary power so that our greedy orientations and gangster-like proclivities don't get out of hand. — Cornel West

I was a gangster when I was young. I had a Robin Hood mentality and tended to always want to support the weak against the strong, but sometimes it was cohesive and I really needed to fall in love with the power of education to find the right venue to express my rage. I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes. — Cornel West

Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102) — Cornel West

Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent. — Cornel West

There's a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There's a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas. — Cornel West

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

We're learning lessons from Africa. And the lesson that we need to learn is, how do we straighten our backs up in the face of these oligarchs and plutocrats who are trying to snatch the best of our democracy away? — Cornel West

I still have a righteous indignation at injustice, no matter what form it takes. It could be homophobia, it could be white supremacy, male supremacy, imperial arrogance, class subordination or whatever. — Cornel West

A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. — Cornel West

We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes. — Cornel West

Prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past. In this sense, the praxis of prophetic pragmatism is tragic action with revolutionary intent, usually reformist consequences and always visionary outlook. — Cornel West

Playboy has a long history of high-quality interviews along with the objectification of women, and so I think she does have a point there. I don't think that the words are necessarily nullified. It's just that that context is something you ought to be suspicious of. — Cornel West

The evil is so ubiquitous in terms of objectification of all of us, that one can say that almost about any TV and even radio show. — Cornel West

The capitalist culture of consumption... does not provide meaningful sustenance for large numbers of people. — Cornel West

Profound music leads us beyond language...to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence. — Cornel West

Sometime you just need to be silent, have a drink and crack a smile or somethin', because the human condition, in general, is just overwhelming in so many ways. — 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

We must never so thoroughly disrespect someone that they are beyond the pale and, therefore, have no possibility of being changed. — Cornel West

If you can't have a good time and smile and relate to people across race and class, then the success that you have ultimately is just sounding brass and tinkling symbol. — Cornel West

Homophobia is very, very difficult to root out, to extricate. That's why we have to bear witness. That's why we have to be so public about it, and that's why we can't just play footsie with it. — Cornel West

All individuals have the same value, not to be determined by market price. They're made in the image and likeness of God. — Cornel West

Every empire suffers from hubris, arrogance and condescension, and therefore a moral blindness. That's true of the American empire, it was true of the British Empireearlier, and it will certainly be true of the Chinese Empire in the future. — Cornel West

Part of the problem is we had so far to go, given the deep homophobia in our society. But, the movement is very real. The movement is very real. — Cornel West

Music at its best...is the grand archeology into and transfiguration of our guttural cry, the great human effort to grasp in time our deepest passions and yearnings as prisoners of time. Profound music leads us--beyond language--to the dark roots of our scream and the celestial heights of our silence. — Cornel West

Anger can be a bitterness that devours your soul while righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven. — Cornel West

John Coltrane was an addict; Billie Holiday was an addict; Eugene O'Neill was an addict. What would America be without addicts and post-addicts who make such grand contributions to our society? — Cornel West

I have a whole lot of fun in trying to serve others and just keeping it funky, trying to keep it real, trying to ensure that we are able to be ourselves and get beyond these deodorized discourses and deodorized spaces that put on masks. — Cornel West

I'm not a pacifist at all; I think there is a notion of "just war" that can be persuasively argued. I think in the face of Nazis, in the face of apartheid, that I would have joined those armies. But that's the last, last resort. — Cornel West

You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly. — Cornel West

Any great artist is wrestling with their sadness and loneliness, their fears, anxieties and securities, and they're transfiguring those into complicated forms of expression that affect our hearts, minds and souls and remind us of who we are as human beings, the fragility of our human status and the inevitability of death. — Cornel West

I'm a Christian, but I'm not a puritan. I believe in pleasure and orgiastic pleasure has its place, intellectual pleasure has its place, social pleasure has its place, televisual pleasure has its place [in life]. — Cornel West

Part of the challenge of the Barack Obama campaign was to try to neutralize that white backlash, and of course, he was masterful in doing that. — Cornel West

There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one's mind that warrants freedom. — Cornel West

Life Lessons by Cornel West

1. Cornel West emphasizes the importance of education as a tool to empower individuals and combat systemic injustice.
2. He encourages students to pursue knowledge for its own sake, and to use it to challenge existing power structures and create a more equitable society.
3. He also emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and self-knowledge, and the need to recognize and respect the perspectives of others.