Success is such a relative thing for me. I’m fundamentally a Christian which means that ultimately all of the penultimate titles and things you just had to wear with a loose garment. Really.
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.
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.
There is no organizations and institutions that are worthwhile in terms of fighting for and dying for unless there is some individual integrity and character and virtue that is at work within various individuals in those institutions especially their leaders.
There’s a number of hip-hop artists who are highly talented but politically retrograde.
I think philosophy is all about lived experience, which is to say life in the streets, life in a variety of different contexts.
There’s a certain pleasure of the life of the mind that cannot be denied. There’s a certain pleasure about being around people who enact a playfulness when it comes to the world of ideas.
I think, Tom Friedman is right, and I think that we have to – we have to have a serious public dialogue to try to shift public policy in that regard.
If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.
Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that’s being pushed to the margins, and you can see it.
Clever gimmicks of mass distraction yield a cheap soulcraft of addicted and self-medicated narcissists.
The powerful have no monopoly on greed, hatred, fear, or ignorance.
When it comes to our precious poor children of all colors, maybe disproportionally in percentage black and white and red, but all colors, yellow as well as white, we need to push toward integrated schools.
We have a market-driven society so obsessed with buying and selling and obsessed with power and pleasure and property.
A philosopher’s a lover of wisdom.
I don’t draw any distinctions between forms of bigotry or forms of ideology that lose sight of the humanity of people. I can’t stand white supremacy. I can’t stand male supremacy. I can’t stand imperial subjugation. I can’t stand homophobia.
To live is to wrestle with despair, yet never allow despair to have the last word.
You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth.
For me, musicians are poets. Beethoven describes himself as a poet of tones, just like Coltrane’s a poet of tempo.
I loathe nationalism. It is a form of tribalism – the idolatry of the 20th century.