Cornel West Quotes

We [Americans] have to get beyond the greed-run-amok. We have to get beyond indifference to the poor and working people. We have to get beyond polarized politics.

People with a culture of poverty suffer much less from repression than we of the middle class suffer and indeed, if I may make the suggestion with due qualification, they often have a hell of a lot more fun than we have.

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.

The interesting thing about class warfare is that it's only class warfare if it's up, not down. If you talk about welfare cheats or something, that's not class warfare because it's down; you have to talk about rich people before it's class warfare.

Go back to - my first campaign for the United States Senate. I got a bunch of people now talking about inequality. But back then they sure weren't. Back then, folks were saying I was preaching class warfare. Now it's suddenly their campaign platform.

The interesting thing about Georgia is, Atlanta is teeming with middle-class black people and black people with money - and yet there is still segregation.

I was told that the privileged and the people formed two nations.

The greed of the billionaire class has got to end and we are going to end it for them.

At the same time, it's people that are employed - many folks - but they're still not earning enough to get into the middle class.

Us as a people, we can't do it on our own. We have to understand that we're not each other's enemy. We have to stop discriminating against each other due to class and due to race and due to location or financial position.

The neoliberal programs of the last generation have in fact been, and were intended to be, a pretty serious attack on democracy, but also they've led to stagnation or decline for large parts of the population - the working class, the lower middle class, these people have essentially been cast aside.

The Democrats tell all the poor people and all of the middle class that they're only where they are 'cause the rich have cheated them, exploited them, or stolen all their money. The way they're gonna make it equal is to take from those people who have just won life's lottery, the premise being that the poor and the rich and the middle class are gonna get the money.

There's no question that the black middle class has benefited greatly by the civil rights movement. But there is a large black underclass that does not have access to jobs. If there's no clear road to income and status except crime, we should expect social problems. You can't solve this problem without addressing the economic issues, and the same is true with gender.

One glance proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that these unions (railroad craft unions) are exceedingly useful to the corporations; and to the extent that they serve the economic and political purposes of the corporations, they are the foes – and not the friends – of the working class.

The best example of all, to me, that our problems are both personal and cultural and political and social is the whole condition of the middle class economically.

The Class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie.

Millionaires are just as patriotic as poor people. The very wealthy are just as noble and patriotic as the middle class. But nothing has been asked of them in this horrendous recession. And it's time we just ask.

The workmen's revolution, with the terrors of destruction and murder, not only threatens us, but we have already been living upon its verge during the last thirty years, and it is only by various cunning devices that we have been postponing the crisis. The hatred and contempt of the oppressed people are increasing, and the physical and moral strength of the richer classes are decreasing: the deceit which supports all this is wearing out, and the rich classes have nothing wherewith to comfort themselves.

Poverty is a career for lot's of well paid people

If you want a definition of what a coward is, it’s needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them.

Black college-educated people got to where they are on the backs of domestic help, meaning their parents and grandparents. So people should not forget how they got to where they are.

It is all too easy for the liberal media to stir up the irrational hatreds of millions of people, who see themselves as less fortunate than others, by repeatedly talking about eh billions of dollars in 'windfall profits' earned by major corporations, by featuring periodic stories on the opulent living of wealthy individuals, or by pointing an accusing finger at 'loopholes' used by 'the rich.'

Without peace there can be no prosperity for any people, rich or poor. And yet, there can be no peace without erasing the harshness of the growing contrast between the rich and the poor.

What is very troubling is that people who have tried to write literature, even, for example, proletarian writers, seem to write within the norms of the dominant class.

I was told, continued Egremont, that an impassable gulf divided the Rich from the Poor; I was told that the Privileged and the People formed Two Nations, governed by different laws, influenced by different manners, with no thoughts or sympathies in common; with an innate inability of mutual comprehension.