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.

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

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.

The problem is we need much more moral content.

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

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.

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.

Black people have been working hard for decades.

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

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.

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.

There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference.

Homophobia is very very difficult to root out to extricate. Thats why we have to bear witness. Thats why we have to be so public about it and thats why we cant just play footsie with it.

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.

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.

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

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

Rage is fine as long as it doesn't deteriorate into bitterness.

When you are fundamentally committed to something that is right you just decide to go down fighting. Period.

Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love.

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.

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.

We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.

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

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.

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

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility.

Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity connectivity at its center. Its a form of spiritual emptiness.

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.

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.

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.

And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you.

If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.

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.

You dont begin by dehumanizing those who are dehumanizing you because it contributes to the cycle of dehumanization in the world.

Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self medicated narcissists.

I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft.

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

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.

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

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

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 it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good.

This market way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience.

Black people have always been Americas wilderness in search of a promised land.

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public

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