Cornel West

The problem is we need much more moral content.

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

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

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.

I grew up in traditional black patriarchal culture and there is no doubt that I’m going to take a great many unconscious, but present, patriarchal complicities to the grave because it so deeply ensconced in how I look at the world. Therefore, very much like alcoholism, drug addiction, or racism patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

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

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.

I've never been tied to one party or one candidate or even one institution. And that's true even with one church as a Christian. I'm committed to truth and justice.

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.

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.

Now, myself, I'm not a pacifist at all. I believe in just war. I would have joined the spirit of the nation to fight against apartheid.

White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.

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

To be human you must bear witness to justice.

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

There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.

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.

The challenge artists face today is whether to be an underground, unheard genius, or to dilute their art for the marketplace.

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

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

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.