Quotes About Hooks

#1. Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.

Bell Hooks

#2. Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.

Bell Hooks

#3. 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.

Bell Hooks

#4. A central theme of all about love is that from childhood into adulthood we are often taught misguided and false assumptions about the nature of love. Perhaps the most common false assumption about love is that love means we will not be challenged or changed.

Bell Hooks

#5. Loving friendships provide us with a space to experience the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflict while staying connected.

Bell Hooks

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

Bell Hooks

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

Bell Hooks

#8. Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

Bell Hooks

#9. Ultimately the men who choose against violence, against death, do so because they want to live fully and well, because they want to know love. These are the men who are true heroes, the men whose lives we need to know about, honor, and remember.

Bell Hooks

#10. Without justice there can be no love.

Bell Hooks

#11. There is no politically neutral art.

Bell Hooks

#12. 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.

Bell Hooks

#13. The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things, led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one's viewpoint.

Bell Hooks

#14. Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn't want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.

Bell Hooks

#15. I did not want to hear the pain of my male partner because hearing it required that I surrender my investment in the patriarchal ideal of the male as protector of the wounded. If he was wounded, then how could he protect me? As

Bell Hooks

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

Bell Hooks

#17. 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.

Bell Hooks

#18. [Our] struggle for liberation has significance only if it takes place within a feminist movement that has as its fundamental goal the liberation of all people.

Bell Hooks

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

Bell Hooks

#20. You must always, always tell the truth. If you are mad, say so. If someone asks you anything, try to find the exact words to describe what you have to say. If you try to tell the exact truth, always, you will ground yourself, become yourself. The truth connects you. It hooks you back up.

George Hodgman

#21. A good history covers not only what was done, but the thought that went into the action. You can read the history of a country through its actions.

Benjamin Hooks

#22. I've been here before, dreaming myself
backwards, among grappling hooks of light.
True to the seasons, I've lived every word
spoken. Did I walk into someone's nightmare?

Yusef Komunyakaa

#23. Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness.

Bell Hooks

#24. 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

Bell Hooks

#25. I think inequality is in our minds. I think this is what we learn through practice. The bridge of illusion must be shattered in order for a real bridge to be constructed. One of the things we learn is that inequality is an illusion.

Bell Hooks

#26. We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they're beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.

Bell Hooks

#27. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it's not empty. It's full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you'd have.

Elan Mastai

#28. It is important for this country to make its people so obsessed with their own liberal individualism that they do not have time to think about a world larger than self.

Bell Hooks

#29. It's a comedy thriller, brilliantly written and it's full of twists and turns at every page. When I was reading it I was desperate to get to the end to find out what happens, it really hooks you.

Louise Jameson

#30. 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.

Bell Hooks

#31. The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks ... of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources.

Bell Hooks

#32. One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.

Bell Hooks

#33. JOY in the LORD puts our mouths out of taste for the pleasures with which the tempter baits his hooks.

Matthew Henry

#34. Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.

Bell Hooks

#35. The neat binary categories of white and black or male and female are not there when it comes to class. How will they identify the enemy. How will they know who to fear or who the challenge.

Bell Hooks

#36. The great thing about reading diverse news from the fields of business, health, science, technology, politics, and more is that you automatically see patterns in the world and develop mental hooks upon which you can hang future knowledge.

Scott Adams

#37. In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.

Sylvia Plath

#38. 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.

Bell Hooks

#39. The widespread assumption that ethical behavior takes the fun out of life is false. In actuality, living ethically ensures that relationships in our lives, including encounters with strangers, nurture our spiritual growth.

Bell Hooks

#40. I think when I feel fear, that's often a cue that I should do something. If I begin to feel fear, that's a strong sign, psychologically, that something has its hooks in me somewhere deep.

Robin Weigert

#41. Spirits bring contentment for a time carry us closer to the sacred moving through bitterness our yearning to hold on to moments of ecstasy where we imagine we hear clearly destiny calling

Bell Hooks

#42. Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.

Bell Hooks

#43. Ironically, the worship of of death as a strategy for coping with our underlying fear of death's power does not truly give us solace. It is deeply anxiety producing. The more we watch spectacles of death, of random violence and cruelty, the more afraid we become in our daily lives.

Bell Hooks

#44. Spiritual seekers let their light shine so that others may see; not only to give service by example, but also to constantly remind themselves that spirituality is most gloriously embodied in our actions, our habits of being.

Bell Hooks

#45. Couples who rarely or never have sex can know lifelong love.

Bell Hooks

#46. It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response.

Bell Hooks

#47. ... move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.

Bell Hooks

#48. It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

Bell Hooks

#49. Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.

Bell Hooks

#50. Without confronting internalized sexism women
who picked up the feminist banner often betrayed the cause in their
interactions with other women.

Bell Hooks

#51. Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.

Bell Hooks

#52. While the patriarchal boys in hip-hop crew may talk about keeping it real, there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip-hop.

Bell Hooks

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

Bell Hooks

#54. The little things. Perhaps it is these trivialities I have been writing down in my book, these small hooks on which my whole life is hung.

S.J. Watson

#55. If you do not know what you feel, then it is difficult to choose love; it is better to fall. Then you do not have to be responsible for your actions.

Bell Hooks

#56. It was Rick's Rubin idea to have the 'Brooklyn' verse repeat. It already was a story, but having that made it a folk song. Instead of this rambling march of verses, Rick understands that music needs hooks. You need that repeated chorus, that everyone can sing along to.

Scott Avett

#57. Shahrazad Ali's The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman.

Bell Hooks

#58. We love great melodies and great songs that have great hooks and melodies, so we start a little bit more on that side as opposed to other people that start more lyric-based. Sometimes we'll do it the other way.

Dave Haywood

#59. To not understand neocolonialism is to not fully live in the present.

Bell Hooks

#60. It's the way his pinky hooks with mine, just for a second, before he full-on cups my hand.

Krista Ritchie

#61. Refusal to stand up for what you believe in weakens individual morality and ethics as well as those of the culture.

Bell Hooks

#62. If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.

Bell Hooks

#63. I have no fear here, in this world of trees, weeds, and growing things.

Bell Hooks

#64. Human memory, they say, is like a coat closet: The most enduring outcome of a formal education is that it creates rows of coat hooks so that later on, when you come upon a new piece of information, you have a hook to hang it on. Without a hook, the new information falls on the floor.

Ursula Goodenough

#65. Most gay men are as sexist in their thinking as are heterosexuals. Their patriarchal thinking leads them to construct paradigms of desirable sexual behaviour that is similar to that of patriarchal straight men.

Bell Hooks

#66. The more hooks an idea has, the better it will cling to memory.

Chip Heath

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

Bell Hooks

#68. Ritically intervene in a way that challenges and changes.

Bell Hooks

#69. Someone saved my life tonight, sugar bear, you almost had your hooks in me, didn't you dear?

Elton John

#70. "Is it how she moves, or how she looks?" I say it's loneliness suspended to our own like grappling hooks, And as long as she's got noise, she's fine. But I could teach her how I learned to dance when the music's ended.

Dar Williams

#71. Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.

Bell Hooks

#72. I love emotional, intense stuff; it's easier to grab onto than just being simple. Being simple and relaxed can be the hardest thing. It can be easier to get your hooks into something big.

Mark Pellegrino

#73. Hooks need to be predictable and not predictable at the same time.

Ken Hill

#74. All the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.

Bell Hooks

#75. The principle of equality, which is at the core of democratic values, has very little meaning in a world in which global oligarchy is taking over.

Bell Hooks

#76. We're no longer arguing about riding in the back of the bus, but being the bus driver or the president of the bus company. We're not pushing for the right to buy the hot dog, but selling the hot dog and the right to own the hot dog franchise.

Benjamin Hooks

#77. 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.

Bell Hooks

#78. We need to interrogate "reverence," for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.

Bell Hooks

#79. Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.

Bell Hooks

#80. We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

Bell Hooks

#81. Showing aggression is the simplest way to assert patriarchal manhood. Men of all classes know this. As a consequence, all men living in a culture of violence must demonstrate at some point in their lives that they are capable of being violent.

Bell Hooks

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

Bell Hooks

#83. Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it.

Bell Hooks

#84. I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.

Bell Hooks

#85. To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.

Bell Hooks

#86. My belief that God is love, that love is everything
our true destiny
sustains me.

Bell Hooks

#87. Love allows us to confront these negative realities in a manner that is life-affirming and life enhancing.

Bell Hooks

#88. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.

Bell Hooks

#89. A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.

Bell Hooks

#90. We use the word God. God hooks all the other words up. I'm the pope. I'm ten times the pope. I'm sixty times the pope. But I'm the pope in the hills and in the mountains.

Charles Manson

#91. 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.

Bell Hooks

#92. When men and women are loyal to ourselves and others, when we love justice, we understand fully the myriad ways in which lying diminishes and erodes the possibility of meaningful, caring connection, that it stands in the way of love.

Bell Hooks

#93. Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we value and as a consequence how we know what we know as well as how we use what we know.

Bell Hooks

#94. I always tell my students that Malcolm X came both to his spirituality and to his consciousness as a thinker when he had solitude to read. Unfortunately, tragically, like so many young black males, that solitude only came in prison.

Bell Hooks

#95. The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.

Bell Hooks

#96. Letting go, it's so hard The way it's hurting now To get this love untied So tough to stay with this thing 'cos if I follow through I face what I denied I'll get those hooks out of me And I'll take out the hooks that I sunk deep in your side Kill that fear of emptiness, that loneliness I hide.

Peter Gabriel

#97. 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.

Bell Hooks

#98. A fully-realized and known world is also a boring world. Mystery, alongside conflict, is another of those vital vittles that feeds the reader and keeps them hooked. Question marks are shaped like hooks for a reason, I say
so leave lots of questions.

Chuck Wendig

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

Bell Hooks

#100. Hope is the crystal meth of emotions. It hooks you fast and kills you hard.

Jennifer Donnelly