Cornel West Quotes

Study the assumptions behind your actions. Then study the assumptions behind your assumptions.

When you reflect, you are able to put an experience into perspective... reflective thinking enables you to distance yourself from the intense emotions of particularly good or bad experiences and see them with fresh eyes.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

I really like watching myself a lot because it gives me an opportunity to see it from outside the flesh, and when I view it like that, I can be a lot more cynical and see the things that need to be attacked.

I start asking a lot of questions about my own life, and it's not necessarily fun, but it's a good exercise.

We need a dose of doubt and a dose of faith, to challenge each other.

I question everything I do.

Nothing should be taken for granted, even if everybody believes it.

Because I've always been good at knowing what I thought and not reviewing prematurely and have gotten better at those things over the years, my flips are rarely that significant.

I see myself as an avatar of curiosity and doubt.

I'm very inquisitive. I love hanging around people who can teach me. I ask a lot of questions. And I'm very introspective and self-critical.

I think it's very important to keep in the back of your mind: 'What if I'm wrong?'

Would I have fired me? Knowing me? No.

There is nothing more effectual in showing us the weakness of any habitual fallacy or assumption than to hear it sympathetically through the ears, as it were, of a skeptic.

We are not conscious of most things until we ask ourselves questions about them.

The only way someone can be of help to you is in challenging your ideas. If you're ready to listen and if you're ready to be challenged, there's one thing that you can do, but no one can help you. What is this most important thing of all? It's called self-observation.

Until we know the assumptions in which we are drenched, we cannot know ourselves.

Every day I wonder how many things I am dead wrong about. -- True North

Few of us take the pains to study the origin of our cherished convictions.

Those questions - when you think about a thought, when you're believing a thought or concept and you question it - you realize that it changes things. Every cell in your body is awake with inquiry.

The least questioned assumptions are often the most questionable.

What shapes our lives are the questions we ask, refuse to ask, or never think to ask.

This idea is more surely understood by interrogation; WHAT DO I KNOW? which I bear as my motto with the emblem of a pair of scales.

Be brutal with the past, especially your own, and have no respect for the philosophies that are foisted on you from outside.

The quality of one's life is directly related to the quality of questions one asks oneself.