Cornel West Quotes

We absolutely have to do more in government. But we have to bring the people along. Yet we are facing a well-armed neoliberal propaganda lobby that is promoting the notion that the market, however big the corporate players, should get bigger and government has to get smaller and smaller.

I admire President Obama. He inherited the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. That was a terrible time for America.

I've seen a lot of government try to solve problems, and it didn't work. And my view is that the right course for America is to have someone who understands how the economy works who will passionately get America back on track.

We've had a number of economists supporting our legislation. And here's where we are. The American people can judge. Six largest financial institutions in America today have assets of roughly $10 trillion; equivalent to 58 percent of the GDP of the United States of America.

The theory of government I was taught says that government provides benefits, primarily security, to the entire population. In return we pay taxes. But lately the government has been a distributor of special privileges, taking money from some and giving it to others. America is now about evenly split between those who pay income taxes and those who consume them.

Take a look at NAFTA, one of the worst deals ever made by any country having to do with economic development. It's economic un development as far as America is concerned.

Social bonds have given way under the collapse of social protections and the attack on the welfare state. Moreover, all solutions to socially produced problems are now relegated to the mantra of individual solutions.

Pina Bausch's motto was "Dance, otherwise we are lost." She really meant it, that dance was her answer to life and to the troubles and to the problems that can arise. That was her way to deal with everything, to dance.

In Europe, nothing is certain except death and welfare, and why let the former get in the way of the latter?

Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting?

America is a rough room and you don't know what might come your way, so you have to be prepared for almost anything.

More American companies are getting bought by foreign firms or they're becoming foreign firms or they're outsourcing. Right now the tax code says if you want to make something in another country and re-import it back into America, go ahead and do that. We don't want to incentivize that.

South America goes its own way dramatically in international affairs.

What [Donald] Trump is essentially saying is what has always been the case: America is the solution to the problems of the world. But to [Barack] Obama and Hillary [Clinton] and many on the left, America's the problem. America and its superpower status is the problem in the world.

The conservative revolution that Reagan helped usher in gained traction because Reagan's central insight - that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic, with Democratic policy makers more obsessed with slicing the economic pie than with growing the pie - contained a good deal of truth.

Socialism has been preached for so long, the British people no longer have any sense of personal responsibility.

The problem with leftism as a vice is that everyone else is stuck with the hangover.

However, however, if the goal is to abandon America's free enterprise economy, if the goal is to convert America into a submissive member of the international community, if the goal is not to fix America, but to change America, then they want leaders that are going to come up here and fight it every step of the way.

The American way of life is not sustainable. It doesn’t acknowledge that there is a world beyond America.

There are different varieties and forms of capitalism. There are priorities within the capitalist society so that you can have countervailing forces come in and empower your working people and your poor people. There are capitalist societies that do not have poverty. America needs to understand that.

I was really shocked after all of this talk about coal miners and all of this talk about Buy America, the Republicans and the House of Representatives gutted health care and pension protections for coal miners and removed the Buy America provision that had been put in the bill in a bipartisan basis.

In America, we know to ignore artists if they're serious in any way.

The people of this country want an industrial policy that is for America and Americans.

The fundamental fact in the lives of the poor in most parts of America is that the wages of common labor are far below the benefits of AFDC, Medicaid, food stamps, public housing, public defenders, leisure time and all the other goods and services of the welfare state.

There is no way any rational, reasonable person can say that the Bush Administration has been good for America.