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
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. – Cornel West
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. – 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 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
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
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. – Cornel West
We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail. – 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
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. – Cornel West
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
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
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
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. – 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
I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft. – 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
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
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
Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists. – 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
I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered. – 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
