Cornel West Quotes

Barack Obama is an educated fool. He is viewed as the white man in blackface in the community.

A large majority of Americans believe that corporations exert too much influence on our daily lives and our political process.

Wall Street, the banks, and corporate America, has been able to call the shots here. They control our members of Congress and they get what they want.

The Negro today perhaps has more political power than ever before and he is worse off than ever before. It is not votes but dollars that count in this civilization.

Corporations write the legislation. They vote on the legislation. And they give advice on how to pass their bills.

Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.

Money often determines not only who gets elected, but what gets done. Which voices do lawmakers listen to, the banks or home owners, coal companies, or asthma sufferers, the CEOs or the unemployed?

When you have corporate influence on our government outweighing the influence of citizens, that's terrifying. This is something we have to make a big, big noise about.

Big corporations have money and power to make sure every rule breaks their way; people have voices and votes to push back.

If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.

We Blacks have never had a President; we’ve only had preachers.

President Bush is a corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being.

I do not allow hirelings of Standard Oil to define my democracy.

The people are weary of detecting the voice of a corporation manager in every political utterance, in the legislature, the Governor's messages, in the expressed opinions of mayors of cities and the Senators sent by the State to Washington, and even in the decisions of judges on the bench.

We’d be crazy to let corporations get anywhere near our government. The only reason they want to influence government is to plunder—to steal from children.

I don't think that the United States are ready for a presidency as the one of Obama, at least because he would be the first black president.

As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.

There is no way for people to vote against Goldman Sachs.

The South politician preaches to the poor white man, "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the Negro's name Is used, it is plain, For the politician's gain, As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train; But it ain't him to blame -- He's only a pawn in their game.

The financial interests have captured the government institutions.

What really sets Jesse Helms apart is that he is the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country -- a title that one hopes will now be permanently retired.... What is unique about Helms -- and from my viewpoint, unforgivable -- is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.

The interests of the white working class have often been used by white political elites to stave off challenges to inequality and discrimination by black folk and other minority groups.

He missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow

The reason why the Democratic Party fell from grace is because they become nothing more than elitist. That was it. Goldman Sachs - that's who they were.

Americans are not getting screwed by the Republican Party. They're getting screwed by the large corporations that bought and own the Republican Party.