Cornel West Quotes

Materialism is an identity crisis.

We only need so much to survive, but this world we live in tells us we need more stuff to be happy. We're inundated with our televisions, the Internet and advertising that says in order to be happy you have to have these things. When you say, 'Gimme, gimme, gimme,' you will always be in short supply.

There are many things which swallow up men's thoughts while they live, which they will think little of when they are dying. Hundreds are wholly absorbed in political schemes and seem to care for nothing but the advancement of their own party. Myriads are buried in business and money matters and seem to neglect everything else but this world.

The most dangerous thing in the world is the sin of self-reliance and the stupor of worldliness.

Spiritual worldliness kills! It kills the soul! It kills the Church!

Our fathers worshiped the golden calf. The worst you can say of an American now is, he worships the gold of the calf.

Those who set out to serve both God and Mammon soon discover that there is no God.

The worship of the golden calf of old has found a new and heartless image in the cult of money and the dictatorship of an economy which is faceless and lacking any truly human goal.

We read on the foreheads of those who are surrounded by a foolish luxury, that fortune sells what she is thought to give.

The God of this world is riches, pleasure and pride.

There is a danger that threatens everyone in the church, all of us. The danger of worldliness. It leads us to vanity, arrogance and pride.

By continually pushing the message that we have the right to gratification now, consumerism at its most expansive encouraged a demand for fulfillment that could not so easily be contained by products.

In all our quest of greatness, like wanton boys, whose pastime is their care, we follow after bubbles, blown in the air.

Success is full of promise till one gets it, and then it seems like a nest from which the bird has flown.

Unfortunately, in the entertainment field, sometimes you start believing your celebrity. You have a strong tendency to drift from the Lord, which I did. I did drift for a number of years.

Riches are the pettiest and least worthy gifts which God can give a man. What are they to God's Word, to bodily gifts, such as beauty and health; or to the gifts of the mind, such as understanding, skill, wisdom! Yet men toil for them day and night, and take no rest. Therefore God commonly gives riches to foolish people to whom he gives nothing else.

If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf.

The promise of pleasures so alluring that we may devote our lives to their pursuit, and then the haunting realization that these pleasures ultimately do not satisfy.

...existence has become an unreasoning, wild dance around the golden calf, a mad worship of God Mammon. In that dance and in that worship man has sacrificed all his finer qualities of the heart and soul — kindness and justice, honor and manhood, compassion and sympathy with his fellowman.

At the end of your life, you cannot take a penny with you. So what is the object of money if you can't take it with you?

What is the chief end of man?-to get rich. In what way?-dishonestly if we can; honestly if we must. Who is God, the one and only true? Money is God. Gold and Greenbacks and Stock-father, son, and ghosts of same, three persons in one; These are the true and only God, mighty and supreme.

Majestic mighty Wealth is the holiest of our gods.

Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us, now and then, some of those luxurious sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak.... They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account.

Gold! gold! gold! gold! Bright and yellow, hard and cold!

Renunciation means that none can serve both God and Mammon.