Bell Hooks Quotes

#1. I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that.

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#2. I think life experiences are different for people who know what they want as children.

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#3. Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

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#4. Without justice there can be no love.

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#5. Often in my lectures when I use the phrase "imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy" to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.

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#6. I think stress is anything going on in our lives that impinges on our capacity to have optimum well being.

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#7. The idealized woman becomes property, symbol, and ornament; she is stripped of her essential human qualities. The devalued woman becomes a different kind of object; she is the spittoon in which men release their negative anti-woman feelings.

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#8. All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.

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#9. Nowadays we go to a movie and must watch commercials first. The relaxed, receptive state of surrender we like to reserve for the [...] film [...] is now given over to advertising where our senses and our sensibilities are assaulted against our will

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#10. Commitment to truth telling lays the groundwork for the openness and honesty that is the heartbeat of love. When we see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build the necessary foundation for self-love.

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#11. As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.

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#12. To critique sexist images without offering alternatives is an incomplete intervention. Critique in and of itself does not lead to change.

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#13. Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.

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#14. As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.

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#15. Threads of power and domination a palimpsest of greed

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#16. The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming.

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#17. I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

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#18. Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.

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#19. If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades it's meaning.

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#20. Failure to examine the victimization of men keeps us from understanding maleness, from uncovering the space of connection that might lead more men to seek feminist transformation.

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#21. We use the word love in such a sloppy way that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything.

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#22. The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.

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#23. In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.

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#24. I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self.

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#25. [O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.

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#26. All the men I fall for seem to have a commitment problem.

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#27. It is far easier to talk about loss than it is to talk about love. It is easier to articulate the pain of love's absence than to describe its presence and meaning in our lives.

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#28. The outcome of the Clarence Thomas hearings and his subsequent appointment to the Supreme Court shows how misguided, narrow notions of racial solidarity that suppress dissent and critique can lead black folks to support individuals who will not protect their rights.

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#29. Self-acceptance is hard for many of us. There is a voice inside that is constantly judging, first ourselves and then others.

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#30. My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.

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#31. It is crucial for the future of the Black liberation struggle that we remain ever mindful that ours is a shared struggle, that we are each other's fate.

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#32. In truth, true love is all about work.

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#33. She wanted me to remember that pleasure is political
for the capacity to relax and play renews the spirit and makes it possible for us to come to the work of writing clearer, ready for the journey. (bell hooks about Toni Cade Bambara)

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#34. Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.

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#35. I often find it easier to be teaching or giving to others, and often struggle with the place of my own pleasure and joy.

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#36. Profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture.

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#37. When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

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#38. Our cultural obsession with death consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving.

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#39. Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself.

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#40. Shame makes self-acceptance and self-love impossible.

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#41. Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being.

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#42. If one assumes, as I do, that battery is caused by the belief permeating this culture that hierarchical rule and coercive authority are natural, then all our relationships tend to be based on power and domination, and thus all forms of battery are linked.

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#43. I think our culture doesn't recognize passion, because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries.

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#44. That huge majority of black folks who identify as Christian or as believers in other religious faiths (Islam, Buddhism, Yoruba, and so on) need to return to sacred writings about love and embrace these as guides showing us the way to lead our lives.

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#45. If Black women stand strong and our commitment is to ending domination I know that I'm supporting Black males, Black children male and female Black elderly because the bottom line is the struggle to end domination in all its forms.

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#46. At the center of the way black male selfhood is constructed in white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is the image of the brute - untamed, uncivilized, unthinking, and unfeeling.

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#47. When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights - that we respect and uphold their rights.

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#48. Time is aboriginal eternal

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#49. We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy or funds to support the production of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic.

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#50. Power feminism is just another scam in which women get to play patriarchs and pretend that the power we seek and gain liberates us.

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#51. I learned then that it is more fulfilling to live one's life within a circle of love, interacting with loved ones to whole we are committed.

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#52. Growing up is, at heart, the process of learning to take responsibility for whatever happens in your life. To choose growth is to embrace a love that heals.

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#53. A love ethic presupposes that everyone has the right to be free, to live fully and well.

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#54. I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.

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#55. The world demands that you work for it, make families, provide, take no time to listen to your own heart beating.

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#56. For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

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#57. Part of the heart of anarchy is, dare to go against the grain of the conventional ways of thinking about our realities. Anarchists have always gone against the grain, and that's been a place of hope.

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#58. We don't hear much from revolutionary feminists who are white because they're not serving the bourgeois agenda of the status quo.

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#59. Heightened awareness often gives the illusion that a problem is lessening. This is most often not the case. It may mean simply that a problem has become so widespread it can no longer remain hidden or be ignored.

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#60. Our hearts connect with lots of folks in a lifetime but most of us will go to our graves with no experience of true love.

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#61. There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.

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#62. Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power - not because they don't see it, but because they see it and they don't want it to exist.

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#63. Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.

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#64. When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo

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#65. Racism has always been a divisive force separating black men and white men, and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups.

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#66. Those of us who have already chosen to embrace a love ethic, know that when we let our light shine, we draw to us and are drawn to other bearers of light. We are not alone.

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#67. To me, a woman can't be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness.

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#68. The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy

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#69. To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.

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#70. War in its essence is another form of capitalism. Wars make people rich - and they make a lot of people poor, and they take a lot of people's lives away from them. So much of the war that is happening is the attempt of one group to snatch the resources of another group.

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#71. There can be no love without justice.

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#72. By championing hedonistic consumerism and encouraging individuals of all classes to believe that ownership of a particular object mediated the realities of class, mass media created a new image of the rich.

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#73. First and foremost feminist movement urged females to no longer see ourselves and our bodies as the property of men.

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#74. The choice to love is a choice to connect
to find ourselves in the other.

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#75. If men were socialized to desire love as much as they are taught to desire sex, we would see a cultural revolution.

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#76. One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..

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#77. The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies. Living consciously is living with a core of healthy self-esteem. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.

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#78. I feel that I have many real students whom I have not met. Many are in cloisters and they never get out. Others are in prison. But in many cases they practice the teachings much better than those who meet me every day.

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#79. What's so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy.

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#80. Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.

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#81. Since men are not equals in white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal class structure, which men do women want to be equal to?

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#82. By naming sexism as the problem it went directly to the heart of the matter. Practically, it is a definition which implies that all sexist thinking and action is the problem, whether those who perpetuate it are female or male, child or adult.

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#83. The fear of being alone, or of being unloved, had caused women of all races to passively accept sexism and sexist oppression.

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#84. When we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.

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#85. There is light in darkness, you just have to find it.

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#86. education was about the practice of freedom.

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#87. Love is an action, never simply a feeling.

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#88. I'm tired of the naked, raped, beaten black woman body. I want to see an image of black femaleness that alters our universe in some way.

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#89. Folks from the backwoods were certain about two things: that every human soul needed to be free and that the responsibility of being free required one to be a person of integrity, a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says, and does.

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#90. The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.

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#91. Love and abuse cannot co-exist.

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#92. From childhood on, I found many of my angels in favorite authors, writers who created books that enabled me to understand life with greater complexity. These works opened my heart to compassion, forgiveness, and understanding.

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#93. When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.

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#94. To demystify the meaning of love, the art and practice of loving, we need to use sound definitions of love when talking with children, and we also need to ensure that loving action is never tainted with abuse.

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#95. No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much" ... No woman has ever written enough.

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#96. I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.

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#97. I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.

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#98. Love is first and foremost exemplified by action - by practice - not solely by feeling.

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#99. When angels speak of love they tell us it is only by loving that we enter an earthly paradise. They tell us paradise is our home and love our true destiny.

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#100. For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place ... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.

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