Cornel West Quotes

I did say that in-group, authority and purity are necessary for the maintenance of order, but I would never give them a blanket endorsement.

Ideas govern the world, or throw it into chaos.

From the moment I was six I felt sexy. And let me tell you it was hell, sheer hell, waiting to do something about it.

She had already allowed her delectable lover to pluck that flower which, so different from the rose to which it is nevertheless sometimes compared, has not the same faculty of being reborn each spring.

Why does a man take it for granted that a girl who flirts with him wants him to kiss her - when, nine times out of ten, she only wants him to want to kiss her?

Freedom without rules doesn't work. And communities do not work unless they are regulated by etiquette.

All laws are an attempt to domesticate the natural ferocity of the species.

Law gave me some structure... all these rules and internal disciplines.

Property with peace and order; with civil and social manners ... are good things too; and, without them, liberty is not a benefit ... not likely to continue long.

The sense of power is as strong a principle in the mind as the love of pleasure.

Manners make the world work. They're not only based on kindness but also efficiency. When people know what to do, the world is smoother. When no one knows what to do, it's chaos.

Power as an experience is as intense as sex. Power is more pervasive and unremitting. Sex has periods of remission.

Sometimes, whether a desire is excessive or negative depends on the circumstances or society in which you live in.

We think we should have to work in order to feel. We want to have our cake resist us; and then we want to eat it, too.

Aristocrats might shrug, but commoners, dreading any collapse of the social order, wanted the rules of behavior to be observed.

Most people believe you have to have some moral absolutes if you want to hold back chaos.

Pleasures that are in themselves innocent lose their power of pleasing if they become the sole or main object of pursuit.

All at once it hit him: this was power too, just as surely as smashing your fist into someone’s face, just as surely as putting a hammer through someone’s skull. The power to make another person crazy with pleasure instead of fear and pain, to have every cell in another person’s body at your thrall.

I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

In the order named, these are the hardest to control - wine, women and song.

"They order," said I, "this matter better in France."

Do you know what would keep me in Brazil, no matter what happened? Sex!

I own your pleasure," I whispered into his mouth. "I'll take it if you won't give it to me.

Society mediates between the extremes of, on the one hand, intolerably strict morality and, on the other, dangerously anarchic permissiveness through an unspoken agreement whereby we are given leave to bend the rules of the strictest morality, provided we do so quietly and discreetly. Hypocrisy is the grease that keeps society functioning in an agreeable way, by allowing for human fallibility and reconciling the seemingly irreconcilable human needs for order and pleasure.

I would have nobody to control me; I would be absolute: and who but I? Now, he that is absolute can do what he likes; he that can do what he likes can take his pleasure; he that can take his pleasure can be content; and he that can be content has no more to desire. So the matter 's over; and come what will come, I am satisfied.