bell hooks > Quotes

“Cultures of domination rely on the cultivation of fear as a way to ensure obedience.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When men lie to women, presenting a false self, the terrible price they pay to maintain "power over" us is the loss of their capacity to give and receive love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Trusting that another person always intends your good, having a core foundation of loving practice, cannot exist within a context of deception.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“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”
― Bell Hooks, Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

“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.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“This fear of maleness that they inspire estranges men from every female in their lives to greater or lesser degrees, and men feel the loss. Ultimately, one of the emotional costs of allegiance to patriarchy is to be seen as unworthy of trust.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Initially, class privilege was not discussed by white women in the women’s movement. They wanted to project an image of themselves as victims and that could not be done by drawing attention to their class. In fact, the contemporary women’s movement was extremely class bound. As a group, white participants did not denounce capitalism. They chose to define liberation using the terms of white capitalist patriarchy, equating liberation with gaining economic status and money power. Like all good capitalists, they proclaimed work as the key to liberation. This emphasis on work was yet another indication of the extent to which the white female liberationists’ perception of reality was totally narcissistic, classist, and racist. Implicit in the assertion that work was the key to women’s liberation was a refusal to acknowledge the reality that, for masses of American working class women, working for pay neither liberated them from sexist oppression nor allowed them to gain any measure of economic independence.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things.”
― Bell Hooks

“By the end of the seventies the feared yet desired black male body had become as objectified as it was during slavery, only a seemingly positive twist had been added to the racist sexist objectification: the black male body had become the site for the personification of everyone’s desire.”
― bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

“All efforts at self-transformation challenge us to engage in on-going, critical self-examination and reflection about feminist practice, and about how we live in the world. This individual commitment, when coupled with engagement in collective discussion, provides a space for critical feedback which strengthens our efforts to change and make ourselves anew.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“To be oppressed means to be deprived of your ability to choose.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“Many black men who express the greatest hostility toward the white male power structure are often eager to gain access to that power. Their expressions of rage and anger are less a critique of the white male patriarchal social order and more a reaction against the fact that they have not been allowed full participation in the power game.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“The need for instant gratification is a component of greed.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.”
― Bell Hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Imagine a nonpatriarchal culture where counseling was available to all men to help them find the work that they are best suited to, that they can do with joy. Imagine work settings that offer timeouts where workers can take classes in relational recovery, where they might fellowship with other workers and build a community of solidarity that, at least if it could not change the arduous, depressing nature of labor itself, could make the workplace more bearable. Imagine a world where men who are unemployed for any reason could learn the way to self-actualization.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want to be.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We need to theorize the meaning of beauty in our lives so that we can educate for critical consciousness, talking through the issues: how we acquire and spend money, how we feel about beauty, what the place of beauty is in our lives when we lack material privilege and even basic resources for living, the meaning and significance of luxury, and the politics of envy.”
― bell hooks, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics

“How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised? Unable to change the fact of femaleness, she strives to make herself over, to become someone worthy of love.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Maintaining connections with family and community across class boundaries demands more than just summary recall of where one’s roots are, where one comes from. It requires knowing, naming, and being ever-mindful of those aspects of one’s past that have enabled and do enable one’s self-development in the present, that sustain and support, that enrich. One must also honestly confront barriers that do exist, aspects of that past that do diminish.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“The belittling of anyone's attempt to name a context within they were wounded, were made a victim, is a form of shaming. It is psychological terrorism. Shaming breaks our hearts.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other's core identity. Embarking on such a relationship is frightening precisely because we feel there is no place to hide. We are known. All the ecstasy that we feel emerges as this love nurtures us and challenges us to grow and transform.”
― bell hooks

“It is this dependency that became, and is, the breeding ground for abuses of power.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Indeed, all the great movements for social justice in our society have strongly emphasized a love ethic.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“sometimes falling rain
carries memories of betrayal
there in the woods
where she was not meant to be
too young she believes
in her right to be free
in her body
free from harm
believing nature
a wilderness she can enter
be solaced
believing the power
that there be sacred place
that there can be atonement now
she returns with no fear
facing the past
ready to risk
knowing these woods now
hold beauty and danger”
― Bell Hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Often, men who would never think of lying in the workplace lie constantly in intimate relationships. This seems to be especially the case for heterosexual men who see women as gullible.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“It is a contradiction that white females have structured a women’s liberation movement that is racist and excludes many non-white women. However, the existence of that contradiction should not lead any woman to ignore feminist issues. Oftentimes I am asked by black women to explain why I would call myself a feminist and by using that term ally myself with a movement that is racist. I say, “The question we must ask again and again is how can racist women call themselves feminists.” It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Most people have no understanding of the myriad ways feminism has positively changed all our lives. Sharing feminist thought and practice sustains feminist movement. Feminist knowledge is for everybody.”
― Bell Hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“For both men and women, Good Men can be somewhat disturbing to be around because they usually do not act in ways associated with typical men; they listen more than they talk; they self-reflect on their behavior and motives, they actively educate themselves about women’s reality by seeking out women’s culture and listening to women…. They avoid using women for vicarious emotional expression…. When they err—and they do err—they look to women for guidance, and receive criticism with gratitude. They practice enduring uncertainty while waiting for a new way of being to reveal previously unconsidered alternatives to controlling and abusive behavior. They intervene in other men’s misogynist behavior, even when women are not present, and they work hard to recognize and challenge their own. Perhaps most amazingly, Good Men perceive the value of a feminist practice for themselves, and they advocate it not because it’s politically correct, or because they want women to like them, or even because they want women to have equality, but because they understand that male privilege prevents them not only from becoming whole, authentic human beings but also from knowing the truth about the world…. They offer proof that men can change.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“..think about the contradictions and complexities that beset people.
”
― bell hooks, Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies