Cornel West Quotes

“The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that 'justice is what love looks like in public.' I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.”
― Naomi Klein, No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need

“If only religion were an opiate. No known narcotic rots the brain so fast.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens

“In April 2001, a student group called the Progressive Student Labor Movement took over the offices of the university’s president, demanding a living wage for Harvard janitors and food workers. That spring, a daily diversion on the way to class was to see which national figure—Cornel West or Ted Kennedy one day, John Kerry or Robert Reich another—had turned up in the Yard to encourage the protesters.

Striding past the protesters and the politicians addressing them, on my way to a “Pizza and Politics” session with a journalist like Matt Bai or a governor like Howard Dean, I did not guess that the students poised to have the greatest near-term impact were not the social justice warriors at the protests […] but a few mostly apolitical geeks who were quietly at work in Kirkland House”
― Pete Buttigieg, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor's Challenge and a Model for America's Future

“Randolph Bourne … one of the towering public intellectual figures between 1907 and 1918 … wrote a famous essay called ‘The War and the Intellectuals’ … and he says, ‘Idealism should be kept for what is ideal.’ Think about that. Idealism should be kept for what is ideal!

It seems to me that what Randolph Bourne is getting at … is that idealism is not boosterism, just as critique is not castigation. But idealism is a bold and defiant highlighting of hypocrisy …. It is a self-critical and self-correcting procedure.

Hypocrisy can be found in high places of the powerful as well as in places of the powerless. … It cuts both ways. I think this is precisely what Malcolm X had in mind when he provided his technical definition of what a nigger was. Do you recall what he said? He said, ‘a nigger is a victim of American democracy.’ And note the oxymoronic character and self-contradictory character of this formulation.

How could there be a victim of American democracy? Because you point out the hypocrisy and how hypocrisy becomes institutionalized and legalized and you end up with a kind of herrenvolk democracy which, of course, in many ways was the case in the USA until the 1950s.”
― Cornel West, Prophetic Reflections: Notes on Race and Power in America (Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism, Vol. Two)