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" I'm not saying that President Obama should be exempt from criticism, nor do I believe it is some act of racial treason for a black person to hold our president accountable for his actions. "

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" There is always a very delicate interplay between individual actions and institutional conditions. But there is no such thing as institutional conditions without any individual actions and no such thing as individual action without institutional conditions. So there is always personal responsibility. "

Cornel West

Responsibility

Action

Always

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" Black people have been working hard for decades. "

" I always felt called to serve, to empower and ennoble as many people as I could, teaching, truth-telling, exposing lies, bearing witness, and being willing to live and die for something bigger than yourself. I had a passion and love of learning and wisdom that was inseparable from a love of music and the arts. "

" It's impossible to translate Wall Street greed into one or two demands. "

" My dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he's always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. "

" We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail. "

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

" Anytime I look at a president, I don't care what color he is. "

" Neofascism in the United States takes the form of big money, big banks, big corporations, tied to xenophobic scapegoating of the vulnerable, like Mexicans and Muslims and women and black folk, and militaristic policies abroad, with strongman, charismatic, autocratic personality, and that's what Donald Trump is. "

Cornel West

Women

Black

" Poor people and working people have not been the focus of the Obama administration. That for me is not just a disappointment but a kind of betrayal. "

" We had a much deeper sense of community in '67 than we do in '97. This is important to say that not in a nostalgic way because it's not as if '67 was a time when things were so good. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Black prophetic fire is the hypersensitivity to the suffering of others that generates a righteous indignation that results in the willingness to live and die for freedom. "

" We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property. "

" And when I talk about love, I'm talking about something that's great, though, brother. I'm talking about something that will sustain you. "

" I have nothing against rich brothers and sisters. Pray for 'em every day. But callousness and indifference, greed and avarice is something that's shot through all of us. "

" There is no fundamental social change by being simply of individual and interpersonal actions. You have to have organizations and institutions that make a fundamental difference. "

" I take my fundamental cue from John Coltrane that says there must be a priority of integrity, honesty, decency, and mastery of craft. "

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

" I feel as if I have been blessed to undergo a transformation from 'gangster' to 'redeemed sinner with gangster proclivities.' "

" Every president needs to deal with the permanent government of the country, and the permanent government of the country is Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats and the questions becomes what is the relationship between that president and Wall Street. "

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

" We want an economic team, Paul Krugman and Robert Kuttner, Joseph Steiglitz's people and others, who say, you know what? We're sophisticated economists but we're concerned about poor and working people. "

" When you teach black people that they are less beautiful, less moral, less intelligent, and as a result you defer to the white supremacist status quo, you rationalize your accommodation to the status quo, you lose your fire, you become much more tied to producing foliage, what appears to be the case. "

" King's response to our crisis can be put in one word: revolution. A revolution in our priorities, a reevaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens. "

" I tend to be one who just speaks from my soul, and so what comes out sometimes is rather harsh. In that sense, I'm very much a part of the tradition of a Frederick Douglass or a Malcolm X who used hyperbolic language at times to bring attention to the state of emergency. "