Cornel West being his sign (Gemini)

Quotes from a piece in Ny mag:

“I’m not sure I fall out of love,” he ­explained in his office. “I discover that I’m unable to stay. But it’s not as if I don’t still love them. I think in the end they recognize they were probably better off without me.

One of West’s most defining characteristics is a near-total lack of interest in his own psychological archaeology. “I’ve never taken the time to focus on the inner dynamics of the dark precincts of my soul. Like St. Augustine once said, I’m a mystery to myself,” West wrote in his autobiography, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. Even when pressed, he refuses to engage in self-analysis, protesting that 21st-century confessional narcissism isn’t his thing. He preaches humility, but Brother West reads like a catalogue of encounters with the famous and fabulous, among them Sean Combs, Kathleen Battle (whom West dated), Jerome Groopman, Carly Simon, Johnnie Cochran, Luther Vandross, and Sarah Vaughan. “How well does he know himself in the shadow places?” muses his friend Reverend James Forbes, who after eighteen years as senior minister of Riverside Church is also returning to Union this year. “The intellectual gifts become a kind of armor to self-disclosure.”

Even in casual conversation, he uses “every intellectual resource at hand,” says Obery Hendricks, In private-study sessions with West at Princeton, Hendricks remembers, “He was able to seamlessly incorporate black vernacular, black music, with the deepest Western philosophical thinkers. Once we were talking about jazz, and he extemporaneously wanted to talk about the similarities between bebop and a particular moment in the Italian renaissance. I thought, What kind of mind is this? I couldn’t believe it.”

written in 1991 pre social media/digital age :

“..begin by talking about the kind of existentialist chaos that exists in our own lives and our inability to overcome the sense of alienation and frustration we experience when we try to create bonds of intimacy and solidarity with one another. Now part of this frustration is to be understood again in relation to structures and institutions. In the way in which our culture of consumption has promoted an addiction to stimulation - one that puts a premium on packaged and commodified stimulation. The market does this to convince us that our consumption keeps oiling the economy for it to reproduce itself. But the effect of this addiction to stimulation is an undermining, a waning of our ability for qualitatively rich relationships.”

Written pre trump :

“And every historic effort to forge a democratic project has been undermined by two fundamental realities: poverty and paranoia. The persistence of poverty generates levels of despair that deepen social conflict the escalation of paranoia produces levels of distrust that reinforce cultural division. Race is the most explosive issue in American life precisely because it forces us to confront the tragic facts of poverty and paranoia despair, and distrust. In short, a candid examination of race matters takes us to the core of the crisis of American democracy (p. 107).”

“Yet the enslavement of Africans—over 20 percent of the population—served as the linchpin of American democracy; that is, the much-heralded stability and continuity of American democracy was predicated upon black oppression and degradation. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"—they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. What made America distinctly American for them was not simply the presence of unprecedented opportunities, but the struggle for seizing these opportunities in a new land in which black slavery and racial caste served as the floor upon which white class, ethnic, and gender struggles could be diffused and diverted. In other words, white poverty could be ignored and whites' paranoia of each other could be overlooked primarily owing to the distinctive American feature: the basic racial divide of black and white peoples. From 1776 to 1964… this racial divide would serve as a basic presupposition for the expansive functioning of American democracy, even as the concentration of wealth and power remained in the hands of a Few well-to-do white men.”

“I'm sure I've had my phone tapped for years, I don't think it's a crime against humanity they just ought to quit doing it, god damn it.”

“The blues is relevant today because when we look down through the corridors of time, the black American interpretation of tragicomic hope in the face of dehumanizing hate and oppression will be seen as the only kind of hope that has any kind of maturity in a world of overwhelming barbarity and bestiality. That barbarity is found not just in the form of terrorism but in the form of the emptiness of our lives - in terms of the wasted human potential that we see around the world. In this sense, the blues is a great democratic contribution of black people to world history.”

“Like alcoholism and drug addiction, nihilism is a disease of the soul. It can never be completely cured, and there is always the possibility of relapse. But there is always a chance for conversion -- a chance for people to believe that there is hope for the future and a meaning to struggle... Nihilism is not overcome by arguments or analyses; it is tamed by love and care.”

“You work through race, you don’t deny race. It’s the difference between being color-blind and love-struck. You see, if I love you, I don’t need to eliminate your whiteness. If you love me, you don’t need to eliminate my blackness. You embrace humanity.”

“The political triumph of Donald Trump is a symbol and symptom—not cause or origin—of our imperial meltdown. Trump is neither alien nor extraneous to American culture and history. In fact, he is as American as apple pie. Yet he is a sign of our spiritual bankruptcy—all spectacle and no substance, all narcissism and no empathy, all appetite and greed and no wisdom and maturity.”

"As long as you're scared you're on the plantation.”

“… the major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat—that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle.”

"If our world is regulated by reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of Darwin; or reductionist, narrow, sophomoric versions of religious dogma; you end up being childishly anti-scientific, and childishly anti-religious, and you miss the very complex interaction [they share]”

“King never confined himself to being solely the leader of black America—even though the white press attempted to do so.”