{"author":"Cornel West","author_id":"Cornel+West","total_quotes":38,"quotes":[{"text":"This market way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["capitalism","capitalist-market","consumerism"],"id":27890,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one's mind that warrants freedom.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["mind","speak","free "],"id":41166,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"In a democracy the poor will have more power than the rich, because there are more of them, and the will of the majority is supreme. --Aristotle.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["democracy","poverty"],"id":49237,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"To be a Christian is to live dangerously, honestly, freely - to step in the name of love as if you may land on nothing, yet to keep on stepping because the something that sustains you no empire can give you and no empire can take away.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["religion"],"id":58280,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["black-americans","blues","oppression","world-history"],"id":64012,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"Liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["freedom"],"id":66650,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"In these downbeat times, we need as much hope and courage as we do vision and analysis; we must accent the best of each other even as we point out the vicious effects of our racial divide and pernicious consequences of our maldistribution of wealth and power. We simply cannot enter the twenty-first century at each other's throats, even as we acknowledge the weighty forces of racism, patriarchy, economic inequality, homophobia, and ecological abuse on our necks. We are at a crucial crossroad in the history of this nation--and we either hang together by combating these forces that divide and degrade us or we hang separately. Do we have the intelligence, humor, imagination, courage, tolerance, love, respect, and will to meet the challenge? Time will tell. None of us alone can save the nation or world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["america","change","courage","future","hope","inequalities","justice","race"],"id":69601,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"Of course, the aim of a constitutional democracy is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority. (p. 102).","author":"Cornel West","tags":["democracy","majority","minority"],"id":83279,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself. I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["love","music","wisdom "],"id":85053,"author_id":"Cornel+West"},{"text":"In a time in which Communist regimes have been rightfully discredited and yet alternatives to neoliberal capitalist societies are unwisely dismissed, I defend the fundamental claim of Marxist theory: there must be countervailing forces that defend people's needs against the brutality of profit driven capitalism.","author":"Cornel West","tags":["capitalism","marxism"],"id":87815,"author_id":"Cornel+West"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":38,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}