Cornel WestThinkers

Addiction is the dominant form of a culture that suffers from a superficial spectacle and celebrity-connectivity at its center. It's a form of spiritual emptiness.

Affirmative action is responsible for expanding the new black middle-class, but it does not really apply to the poor and working class for whom downsizing and de-industrializing is occurring.

Anger is a bitterness that devours your soul whereas righteous indignation is morally driven, it's ethically driven.

The Black community is disproportionately affected by neoliberal society's three dominant tendencies: Financialized, privatized, militarized.

Blackness is a category determined by nothing but centuries of racist degradation, exploitation, oppression, the abuse of white supremacy, and the struggle against that abuse.

Blackness is and has always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

A Christian is one who lives dangerously, honestly, freely. It is 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.

A Constitutional democracy's aim is to safeguard the rights of the minority and avoid the tyranny of the majority.

Courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being... courage to think, courage to love, courage to hope.

The Dark side of enlightenment is the use of literacy to justify the enslavement of african people.

Education is soul crafting.

Education is today constructed around a market model that makes it increasingly about 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.