Cornel West Quotes

I'm talking about just as an ongoing, everyday matter of daily life, one of the most destructive things if not the most is radical liberalism, leftism. And it is clear that they are making great strides in corrupting once-great institutions and once-great traditions.

Liberalism is a series of grievances in addition to everything else that it is.

We love America just as much as they do. But in a different way. You see, they love America like a 4-year-old loves his mommy. Liberals love America like grown-ups. To a 4-year-old, everything Mommy does is wonderful and anyone who criticizes Mommy is bad. Grown-up love means actually understanding what you love, taking the good with the bad and helping your loved one grow.

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.

It's an old story; it's as old as our history. The difference between Democrats and Republicans has always been measured in courage and confidence. The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak, are left behind by the side of the trail. The strong, the strong they tell us, will inherit the land. We Democrats believe in something else. We Democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once.

Given the religious nature and the emotional power of Leftist values, Jews and Christians on the Left often derive their values from the Left more than from their religion.

This is a hallmark trait of the left. There is never any effort to elevate anybody. Liberalism is all about tearing down. Liberalism is all about lowering. It is all about destroying 'em.

You cannot reform your society or institution without opening your mind. So the core issue is how to open the mind, the whole society, and this means everybody in society including everyone. I am not talking about the state or average or common people. I am talking about everybody; because when you close your mind as an official you cannot upgrade and vice versa.

I nearly always find, when I ask a vegetarian if he is a socialist, or a socialist if he is a vegetarian, that the answer is in the affirmative.

Tom Paine was a great American visionary. His book, Common Sense, sold a couple of hundred thousand copies in a population of four or five million. That means it was a best seller for years. People were thoughtful then. Hope is one thing. But you need to have hope with thought.

I'm fascinated by politics. I love watching everyone from Neil deGrasse Tyson to Lawrence Krauss to people like Richard Dawkins and Noam Chomsky on YouTube.

Being a liberal progressive has been demonized as anti-white or overly on the side of blacks. There's nothing that can be done about that; it's just where we are in the history of our perceptions.

What's called "liberal" in the intelectual culture means highly conformist to power, but mildly critical.

I did a lot of reading. I read about democratic socialism. And I read about the efforts of people for such a long time trying to create a society in which all people can live with dignity. And that's kind of what I believe.

You can define everything as being political and analyze it politically.

Schools should be democratic public spheres. They should be places that educate people to be informed, to learn how to govern rather than be governed, to take justice seriously, to spur the radical imagination, to give them the tools that they need to be able to both relate to themselves and others in the wider world. I mean, at the heart of any education that matters, is a central question: How can you imagine a future much different than the present, and a future that basically grounds itself in questions of economic, political and social justice?

I am a Liberal, yet I am a Liberal tempered by experience, reflexion, and renouncement, and I am, above all, a believer in culture.

I think that in a certain sense, we're concerned about the same issues. How do you accent the progressive, the prophetic, those things that are critical of all forms of injustice, all forms of bigotry, all forms of dehumanizing other people, and yet still allow for a certain kind of flow, linguistic flow, certain kinds of melodies and harmonies in the samplings that take place?

I'm a liberal and I'm left of Gandhi and I don't like Trump.

I've always said that liberalism is one of the most gutless choices you can make. All you have to do to be acknowledged as a good liberal is to see suffering and tell people you see it, and that will convey you have a big heart and that you care and that you're troubled.

Most activists on the Left believe that they, not only their values, are morally superior to their adversaries. Therefore, coercing people to adhere to 'progressive' values is morally acceptable, even demanded.

I think that one of the questions that I asked of myself in later years was to this point of the political directive.

Go back to the Bible, the Old Testament. I mean there were people who we would call intelectuals, there, they were called prophets, but they were basically intelectuals: they were people who were doing critical, geopolitical analysis, talking about the decisions of the king were going to lead to destruction; condemning inmorality, calling for justice for widows and orphans. What we would call dissident intelectuals. Were they nicely treated? No, they were driven into the desert, they were imprisoned, they were denounced. They were intelectuals who conformed.

One of the big mysteries for many conservatives for many, many moons - including me - was the existence of liberal Jews who put liberalism before their Judaism.

People of my generation knew we needed to move beyond that, the racial division and segregation and unsustainable social relations, that were unfair to millions of people. But it didn't mean that we were going to become a big government liberal.