Cornel West: Never Forget That Justice Is What Love Looks Like In Public

I love Cornel West. I love his courage, integrity, truth-telling, and unrelenting and fierce engagement in the struggle for a better world — for a society that is just, equitable, and caring. I love all who inspire us to wake up, be conscious and accountable, and act. May we be inspired by the truths, power, wisdom, and love held in these quotes. — Molly 

  

 The Courage and Wisdom of

Cornel West

King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.

There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie.

You can't lead the people if you don't love the people. You can't save the people if you don't serve the people.

The country is in deep trouble. We've forgotten that a rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. We need the courage to question the powers that be, the courage to be impatient with evil and patient with people, the courage to fight for social justice. In many instances we will be stepping out on nothing, and just hoping to land on something. But that's the struggle. To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.

To be an intellectual really means to speak a truth that allows suffering to speak.

You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.

Too many young folk have addiction to superficial things and not enough conviction for substantial things like justice, truth and love. 

Greatness is telling the truth and being courageous in pursuit of justice. The worst thing you could tell young people is to be successful but become well-adjusted to an unjust status quo as opposed to being great and being maladjusted to an unjust status quo.

We have to be militants for kindness, subversive for sweetness and radicals for tenderness.

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.

To be human, at the most profound level, is to encounter honestly the inescapable circumstances that constrain us, yet muster the courage to struggle compassionately for our own unique individualities and for more democratic and free societies. 

To me, healing means you have to recognize there is a wound and you try to understand what the sources of the wound are, which means you try to tell a story about how it came to be. So you have to engage in some historical interpretation. 

You've got to love yourself enough, not only so that others will be able to love you, but that you'll be able to love others.

We are who we are because somebody loved us. 

It takes tremendous discipline, takes tremendous courage, to think for yourself, to examine yourself.

Courage is being true to yourself, true to a sense of integrity. 

One of the things I love most about Martin Luther King is that he was willing to sacrifice his popularity in favor of his integrity. He was an honest man, and he would tell the truth. 

None of us alone can save the nation or the world. But each of us can make a positive difference if we commit ourselves to do so. 

A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.

There are three dominant tendencies in a neoliberal society: financialized, privatized, militarized. And when it comes to black poor people, we get all three.

You see it even in our educational systems, where the market model becomes central. It's a matter of just gaining a skill or gaining access to a job to live in some vanilla suburb, as opposed to becoming a critical citizen concerned with public interest and common good. 

Patriarchy is a disease and we are in perennial recovery and relapse. So you have to get up every morning and struggle against it.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.

Market moralities and mentalities — fueled by economic imperatives to make a profit at nearly any cost — yield unprecedented levels of loneliness, isolation, and sadness. And our public life lies in shambles, shot through with icy cynicism and paralyzing pessimism. To put it bluntly, beneath the record-breaking stock markets on Wall Street and bipartisan budget-balancing deals in the White House lurk ominous clouds of despair across this nation. 

I don't draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can't stand white supremacy. I can't stand male supremacy. I can't stand imperial subjugation. I can't stand homophobia. 

Nihilism is a natural consequence of a culture (or civilization) ruled and regulated by categories that mask manipulation, mastery and domination of peoples and nature. 

Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street. 

The aim is not for me to be right. The aim is to make sure that we keep the focus on the people who are suffering. That's what we're here for. 

To get up in the morning and do the monumental tasks that face us, our labor is best fueled by love. 

The only countervailing force against organized money at the top, is organized people at the bottom.

 

When ordinary people wake up, elites begin to tremble in their boots. They can't get away with their abuse. They can't get away with subjection. They can't get away with subjugation. They can't get away with exploitation. They can't get away with domination. It takes courage for folk to stand up.

A rich life consists fundamentally of serving others, trying to leave the world a little better than you found it. 

The greatest gift you can give someone is the gift of inspiration. 

You can't talk about truth without talking about learning how to die because it's precisely by learning how to die, examining yourself and transforming your old self into a better self, that you actually live more intensely and critically and abundantly. 

You have to have a habitual vision of greatness ... you have to believe in fact that you will refuse to settle for mediocrity. You won't confuse your financial security with your personal integrity, you won't confuse your success with your greatness or your prosperity with your magnanimity ... believe in fact that living is connected to giving.

The love of wisdom is a way of life; that is to say, it's a set of practices that have to do with mustering the courage to think critically about ourselves, society, and the world; mustering the courage to empathize; the courage, I would say, to love; the courage to have compassion with others, especially the widow and the orphan, the fatherless and the motherless, poor and working peoples, gays and lesbians, and so forth — and the courage to hope. 

Empathy is not simply a matter of trying to imagine what others are going through, but having the will to muster enough courage to do something about it. In a way, empathy is predicated upon hope. 

Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there's enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, "It doesn't look good at all. Doesn't look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever." That's hope. I'm a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope.

 

If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.

The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak, it means then that if you have a prophetic sensibility, you are committed to loving others and if you love others, you hate injustice. 

Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.