Cornel West Quotes

You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.

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.

When you place a high value on truth, you have to think for yourself.

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.

I think we must never, ever demonize one another. That’s true not just black people to black people; that’s human being to human being.

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

There has been a crisis of leadership in both parties. The leadership class is losing its legitimacy. We want order with truth and justice at the center of it.

The Israeli government has such an assumption of impunity. It can do anything and get away with it and have the complicity of the media in the United States and in the West.

The courage to be is the most difficult thing for any human being.

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

Part of the problem of our present moment of such moral decay and spiritual decrepitude is too much conformity, too much complacency, too much complicity, and too much cowardliness.

[…] you got a decrepit electoral political system that is colonized by big money, but you still have to be able to intervene and try to stay in contact with those few politicians who are concerned about poor and working people.