Cornel West Quotes

If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal.

Life remains the same for me. It's always been a battle against injustice and corruption. That battle goes on.

As I grew older and got into the late teens and early 20s, I wanted to be a voice of the people. You know, getting locked up all the time and going through so much oppression and seeing it all around myself, I wanted to be a voice for it.

The purposeful many need not and will not bow to the willful few.

I'm not trying to get power over white. I'm involved in a freedom struggle. Not a power struggle.

Democracy is not what we hate the most and what we fear the most. We need to stand up.

Nelson Mandela was a terrorist. And then he wins the world peace prize and becomes president of South Africa. That's how change happens. It's very important not to differentiate protest from the democratic process.

I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win.

You do not keep American democracy in suspense. Because, look, too many people have marched and protested and fought and died for this democracy.

They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and that we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘We ain’t going to let nobody turn us around.’

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle.

No. What would I look like fighting for equality with the white man? I don't want to go down that low. I want the true democracy that'll raise me and that white man up raise America up.

Lost rights are never regained by appeals to the conscience of the usurpers, but by relentless struggle....goa ts are used for sacrificial offerings and not lions.

The Black Lives Matter movement, the various Occupy movements in Spain and the rest of Europe, in this country, and elsewhere serve as an example of what can be done, and how strong the voices for positive change and truly democratic progress can be.

All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America?

We want to be making clear that if [Donald Trump] tries to deliver on his word, that we will be there to say no.

The only way I can pay back for what fate and society have handed me is to try, in minor totally useless ways, to make an angry sound against injustice.

I hope that even if I go to jail, it will motivate more and more Hongkongers to commit to determine our future, instead of fully relying on those ruling class who have dominated our future.

People resist exploitation. They resist as actively as they can, as passively as they must.

Democracy alone can supply the vitalizing force to stir the peoples of the world into triumphant action, not only against their human oppressors, but also against their ancient enemies-hunger, misery, and despair.

All over this world people are standing up for freedom.

We are here to advance the cause of women and to advance the cause of democracy and to make it absolutely clear that the two are inseparable.

There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.

What we need to do is stand up and fight for our people in our states.

Every man or woman who makes a stand helps keep the flame of freedom burning.