If they think they have issues with the president not doing enough for the poor now, wait and see what happens if the opposition takes office. Then they would really need a poverty tour. - Cornel West

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Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth. - Cornel West

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We want to bear witness today that we know the relation between corporate greed and what goes on too often in the Supreme Court decisions. - Cornel West

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There is something about boldness and fearlessness and being free enough to speak what is on one's mind that warrants freedom. - 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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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. - Cornel West

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A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all. - 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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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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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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