Cornel West: Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor lov...

Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, a whole host of brilliant, courageous critics say all kinds of things, and he [Barack Obama] treats them with respect. They get invited to the White House. I say the same thing, he talks to me like I'm a Cub Scout.

Cornel West

courageous white house

Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?

Cornel West

black white doe

You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit.

Cornel West

wall greed obsession

I do believe that not just the churches but strong communities, strong trade unions, strong families can make a difference in terms of producing persons much more virtuous than what one usually finds in a gangster culture.

Cornel West

differences strong believe

I wished the president [Barack Obama] were more "Martin Luther King-like."

Cornel West

luther president kings

Truth is fine. Absolutely.

Cornel West

fine truth-is

Love is fundamentally a death of an old self that was isolated and the emergence of a new self now entangled with another self, the self that you fall in love with.

Cornel West

falling-in-love self love-is

Rap is just a movement within the larger culture of hip-hop.

Cornel West

rap hip-hop culture

I believe philosophy must go to school with the poets; it's not either/or, it's not over or against.

Cornel West

philosophy believe school

Philosophy is fundamentally about how you come to terms with living your life and trying to do it in a wise manner, and, for me, that means decently and compassionately and courageously and so forth.

Cornel West

wise philosophy mean

I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts.

Cornel West

different philosophy thinking

There's simply no philosophizing without a love of wisdom, absolutely.

Cornel West

I'd say, [writing memoir] not so much a model, but maybe to provide an insight, here or there, to help somebody come to terms with the dark corners of their own soul, to come to terms with the undecided, their own sense of self, and maybe help develop a capacity to love - to love wisdom, love justice.

Cornel West

capacity-to-love dark writing

I'm actually with the classics in general in terms of understanding truth in an existential mode. Therefore, philosophy becomes more a way of life as opposed to simply a mode of discourse.

Cornel West

understanding philosophy way

Pleasure, no matter how desirable, is never innocent: it's always presupposing and assuming a certain kind of social order, one usually shot through structures of domination.

Cornel West

assuming matter order

There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions.

Cornel West

delicate individual action

I was blessed to be part of a commercial, pushing for this energy bill, but we've been unsuccessful.

Cornel West

bills energy blessed

I think in the end, you know, we're just addicted to oil. We've got to overcome that addiction, and we need some serious accountability of big oil, because big oil, like so much of big businesses, has just colonized our government, colonized the regulatory agencies so we can't impose any kind of accountability on them.

Cornel West

agency government thinking

The condition of truth, is to allow suffering to speak. Which means attend to suffering of the least of these, of the orphan, the widow, the poor, the working people, the gay brother, the lesbian sister, the transgender, the black people.

Cornel West

gay brother mean

I'm black, so, you know, I'm again with black folk, but it's a love that spills over to vanilla suburbs and red reservations and brown barrios and yellow slices.

Cornel West

red black yellow

Those who have never despaired have neither lived nor loved. Hope is inseparable from despair. Those of us who truly hope make despair a constant companion whom we out-wrestle every day