Cornel West

"I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope."
— Cornel West

"Never forget that justice is what love looks like in public"
— Cornel West

"Aesthetics have substantial political consequences. How one views oneself as beautiful or not beautiful or desirable or not desirable has deep consequences in terms of one’s feelings of self-worth and one’s capacity to be a political agent."
— Cornel West (Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life)

"To accept your country without betraying it, you must love it for that which shows what it might become. America -- this monument to the genius of ordinary men and women, this place where hope becomes capacity, this long, halting turn of 'no' into the 'yes' -- needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it."
— Cornel West