If you view life as a gold rush, you're going to end up worshiping a golden calf. And when you call for help, and that golden calf can't respond, you go under. - Cornel West

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Hey, you got something going here. I think we've got a chance for some progressive policy that actually focuses on poor and working people. - Cornel West

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I'm against genocide. I'm against fascism. I'm willing to fight against them so that, in that sense, I think one can still be committed to justice and committed to peace but recognize the circumstances under which one does have to fight. - Cornel West

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We only become what we are by the radical and deep-seated refusal of that which others have made of us.

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Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists. - Cornel West

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Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that's being pushed to the margins, and you can see it. - Cornel West

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You've got to be a thermostat rather than a thermometer. A thermostat shapes the climate of opinion; a thermometer just reflects it. - Cornel West

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Change won’t happen through ‘trying harder’ but only through encountering the radical grace of God.

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A neoliberal disaster is one who generates a mass incarceration regime, who deregulates banks and markets, who promotes chaos of regime change in Libya, supports military coups in Honduras, undermines some of the magnificent efforts in Haiti of working people, and so forth. - Cornel West

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Part of the popularity with Louis Farrakhan has less to do with the content of his message and more to do with the form that he portrays himself - as being a free black person who speaks what is on his mind with boldness and fearlessness. Who is willing to pay the consequences. - Cornel West

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