Cornel West Quotes

I think that affirmative action programs can be very important.

Affirmative action is an effort to include every aspect of society in the decision making.

So many of our conversations (about affirmative action) have been dishonest

The University has a moral obligation to provide equal opportunities to women, minority persons and all other groups who work or seek to work at Harvard.

The Australian way of affirmative action is setting goals and recognising discrimination and lack of opportunity and deciding to take action and setting some goals and targets. I guess I prefer that language to talking about quotas.

I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights.

I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action, not because I have benefited from it personally - though I have. I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good.

There are cultural biases built into testing, and that was one of the motivations for the concept of affirmative action - to try to balance out those effects.

Equality means nothing unless incorporated into the institutions.

If you don't like affirmative action, what is your plan to guarantee a level playing field of opportunity?

A minority group has 'arrived' only when it has the right to produce some fools and scoundrels without the entire group paying for it.

I support affirmative action. I support special measures when you need it.

Though it's impossible for us to legislate one's thoughts and feelings, we still need things like affirmative action in place because without measures like it, people in charge would not have, sadly, enough impetus to do, as cliched as it sounds, the right thing.

We believe that the Committee on the Federal Judiciary can no longer be all-white. Minority groups, particularly the black lawyers of our nation, should be represented…

In our insistence upon equality of opportunity has our system advanced beyond all the world.

I suspect that it would be impossible to arrange an affirmative action program in a racially neutral way and have it successful. To ask that this be so is to demand the impossible.

Where the effects of past discrimination persist, society has an obligation to take positive steps to overcome the legacy of injustice. Judiciously administered affirmative action programs in education and employment can be important expressions of the drive for solidarity and participation that is at the heart of true justice. Social harm calls for social relief.

It is the policy of the state [of New York] that the American ideal of equality of opportunity requires that students ... be admitted to educational institutions without regard to race, color, religion, creed, or national origin.

Affirmative action is the majority’s constitutional prerogative, through the use of the democratic process—and a means of taking responsibility for the community’s past wrongdoing.

Ending discrimination and extending equality should always be a national priority.

To be sure Plato did not favor 'affirmative action' to fill political and military offices in his own society; nor did he enroll women in his school.

We are all about the equality through society and sport.

If we could create the conditions that make racism difficult, or discourage it, then there would be less stress and less need for affirmative action programs. One of those conditions would be an economic policy that would create tight labor markets over long periods of time. Now does that mean that affirmative action is here only temporarily? I think the ultimate goal should be to remove it.

I have supported affirmative action, I do support affirmative action and I will support affirmative action.

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.