Cornel West Quotes

This country isn't working for working people. It's working only for people at the top. That's not the American dream. That's the American nightmare.

The only way to have a better world and end poverty is by closing the gap between the top and the bottom.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will continue to be distracted by the spectre of race.

It's not my fault that there is this gap between rich and poor, it is the fault of governments. I want a different world. One where I don't wake up thinking I'm so lucky to be able to feed my daughter.

There's a wider agenda that speaks to what the Democratic Party has historically stood for, which are economic rights for those who are struggling in the middle class, concern for the poor, for economic justice for those who are marginalized in our society.

America's 'social contract' is equal opportunity... yet we have failed in achieving that seminal goal.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

I think the defining issue of our time is: Does the economic, social, and political system work for the middle class?

Unless you’re at the very top, you need a more equitable economy.

In a good society, those in the middle and at the bottom ought to benefit significantly from economic growth. When the country prospers, everybody should prosper.

I'm not running from the left; I'm running from the bottom. I'm running in fierce advocacy for working-class New Yorkers.

We have to find a way to make the aspects of capitalism that serve wealthier people serve poorer people as well.

Economic inequality is not about food stamps and homeless shelters. It is about being a devotee of social justice and equality.

Nobody talks about the poor. Everybody talks about the middle class and just kinda want to ignore that the poor exist. And you cannot ignore that they exist if you want to help them.

We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world.

For we, the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it.

Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the children of the highest bidder-the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.

There's a vast class - the poor, the underprivileged, the people least likely to vote - who are not represented any more.

It's immoral and wrong that the top 1 percent of the USA owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent. We should look at countries like Denmark and Sweden and Norway and look at what they've accomplished for their working people.

In the U.S. when people like me started writing things about inequality, the economic journals had no classification for inequality. I couldn't find where to submit my inequality papers because there was no such topic. There was welfare, there was health issues, there was trade obviously. Finance had hundreds of sub groups.

I don't absolve the Democrats of their lack of commitment to deal with poverty. But nowadays we're witnessing the widening of the gap. There's something wrong when a handful of people have more than they'll ever need while millions of people have less than they always need.

If you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids.

Hey, you got something going here. I think we've got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people.

We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people.