Bell Hooks quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Bell Hooks

Bell Hooks Famous Quotes & Sayings

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

Certainly we can end racism with love. We can demand that the federal government change its emphasis on racial distinction.

Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.

What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe.

Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.

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

Nature as chameleon

Feminist movement is pro-family.

The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.

It is no accident that greater cultural acceptance of lying in this society coincided with women gaining greater social equality.

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

No Black woman can become an intellectual without decolonizing her mind.

Being loving does not mean we will not be betrayed. Love helps up face betrayal without losing heart. And it renews our spirit so we can love again.

a deep smothering emptiness

All backwoods folks were poor by material standards; they knew how to make do. They were not wanting to tame the wildness, in themselves or nature.

It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.

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

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

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

We fail at romantic love when we have not learned the art of loving. It's as simple as that. Often we confuse perfect passion with perfect love.

Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now ... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.

In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

To love somebody is not just a strong feeling - it's a decision, it's a judgement, it's a promise.

Privacy is ... connected to a politics of domination.

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

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.

Feminism is not anti- male, Feminism is anti-sexism

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that's feminism.

Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth.

education was about the practice of freedom.

Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

In truth, true love is all about work.

Widespread cultural acceptance of lying is a primary reason many of us will never know love.

Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.

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

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.

The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.

I would also say that, in practice, many more Americans are anarchists than would ever use that term.

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

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

Valuing ourselves rightly means we understand love to be the only foundation of being that will sustain us in both times of lack and times of plenty

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.

Living by a love ethic we learn to value loyalty and a commitment to sustained bonds over material advancement.

Without justice there can be no love.

Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.

Changing how we see images is clearly one way to change the world.

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

Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.

Isolation and loneliness are central causes of depression and despair.

I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go.

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

I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.

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

It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.

The search for love continued even in the face of great odds.

All 'people of one blood' who made homeplace in isolated landscapes where they could invent themselves, where they could savor a taste of freedom.

Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.

Living simply makes loving simple.

Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy.

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

Our freedom is sweet. It will be sweeter when we are all free.

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

Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.

There can be no love without justice.

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.

The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy

Secrets find a way out in sleep ... It is the place where there is no pretense.

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.

Threads of power and domination a palimpsest of greed

Most of us find it difficult to accept a definition of love that says we are never loved in a context where there is abuse.

Spirituality and spiritual life gives us the strength to love.

But love is really more of an interactive process. It's about what we do not just what we feel. It's a verb, not a noun.

Love and abuse cannot co-exist.

You are not going to destroy this imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy by creating your own version of it,

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

Language is also a place of struggle.

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.

You must have courage to love, you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, and it does not come easy.

I told my parents when I was 12 I'd be a writer.

When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat

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

Time is aboriginal eternal

Discipline and devotion are necessary to the practice of love, all the more so when relationships are just beginning.

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

If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.

Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.

Addiction makes love impossible.

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

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

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

Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.

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

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

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

All awakening to love is spiritual awakening

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

Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.