bell hooks > Quotes

“When I speak of the spiritual, I refer to the recognition within everyone that there is a place of mystery in our lives where forces that are beyond human desire or will alter circumstances and/or guide and direct us. I call these forces divine spirit. When we choose to lead a spirit-filled life, we recognize and celebrate the presence of transcendent spirits.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Men do not wound women only when they act violently and abusively. They wound us when they fail to protect our freedom in every aspect of our daily lives”
― belle hooks

“Profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth. It's not what you do but how you do it.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“All over the world people live in intimate daily contact with one another. They wash together, eat and sleep together, face challenges together, share joy and sorrow. The rugged individual who relies on no one else is a figure who can only exist in a culture of domination where a privileged few use more of the world's resources than the many who must daily do without. Worship of individualism has in part led us to the unhealthy culture of narcissism that is so all pervasive in our society.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Learning to wear a mask (that word already embedded in the term "masculinity") is the first lesson in patriarchal masculinity a boy learns. He learns that his core feelings cannot be expressed if they do not conform to the acceptable behaviors sexism defines as male. Asked to give up the true self in order to realize the patriarchal ideal, boys learn self-betrayal early and are rewarded for these acts of soul murder. Therapist John Bradshaw explains the splitting that takes place when a child learns that the way he organically feels is not acceptable. In response to this lesson that his true self is inappropriate and wrong, the boy learns to don a false self. Bradshaw explains, "The feeling that I have done something wrong, that I really don't know what it is, that there's something terribly wrong with my very being, leads to a sense of utter hopelessness. This hopelessness is the deepest cut of the mystified state. It means there is no possibility for me as I am; there is no way I can matter or be worthy of anyone's love as long as I remain myself. I must find a way to be someone else - someone who is lovable. Someone who is not me.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“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, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“And I was already on my way to being a true freak because I knew I would always choose to go where my blood beats, in any and all directions.”
― bell hooks

“Many of us learn as children that friendship should never be seen as just as important as family ties. However, friendship is the place in which a great majority of us have our first glimpse of redemptive love and caring community. Learning to love in friendships empowers us in ways that enable us to bring this love to other interactions with family or with romantic bonds.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“...one of the many uses of theory in academic locations is in the production of an intellectual class hierarchy where the only work deemed truly theoretical is work that is highly abstract, jargonistic, difficult to read, and containing obscure references...any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public,”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Whether they are able to enact it as lived practice or not, many white folks active in anti-racist struggle today are able to acknowledge that all whites (as well as everyone else within white supremacist culture) have learned to overvalue “whiteness” even as they simultaneously learn to devalue blackness.”
― bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

“Love does not lead to an end to difficulties, it provides us with the means to cope with our difficulties in ways that enhance our growth.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“see first-hand the ways that democratic education is being undermined as the interests of big business and corporate capitalism encourage students to see education solely as a means to achieve material success. Such thinking makes acquiring information more important than gaining knowledge or learning how to think critically.”
― Bell Hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

“Love was always and only about good feeling. In early adolescence when we were whipped and told that these punishments were 'for our own good' or 'I'm doing this because I love you,' my siblings and I were confused. Why was harsh punishment a gesture of love? As children do, we pretended to accept this grown-up logic; but we knew in our hearts it was not right. We knew it was a lie. Just like the lie the grown-ups told when they explained after the harsh punishment, 'This hurts me more than it hurts you.' There is nothing that creates more confusion about love in the minds and hearts of children than unkind and/or cruel punishment meted out by the grown-ups they have been taught should love and respect. Such children learn early on to question the meaning of love, to yearn for love even as they doubt it exists.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Love cannot coexist with domination.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think. ”
― bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation

“To understand feminism it implies one has to necessarily understand sexism.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“We can begin the process of making community wherever we are. We can begin by sharing a smile, a warm greeting, a bit of conversation; by doing a kind deed or by acknowledging kindness offered to us. Doing this we engage in love practice [...] we lay foundation for the building of community with strangers. The love we make in community stays with us wherever we go. With this knowledge as our guide, we make any place we go, a place where we return to love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“One of the most important social myths we must debunk if we are to become a more loving culture is the one that teaches parents that abuse and neglect can coexist with love. Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Loneliness chosen is always preferable to loneliness imposed”
― Bell Hooks

“Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Much popular self-help literature normalizes sexism. Rather than linking habits of being, usually considered innate, to learned behavior that helps maintain and support male domination, they act as those these difference are not value laden or political but are rather inherent and mystical. In these books male inability and/or refusal to honestly express feelings is often talked about as a positive masculine virtue women should learn to accept rather than a learned habit of behavior that creates emotional isolation and alienation.... Self-help books that are anti-gender equality often present women's overinvestment in nurturance as a 'natural,' inherent quality rather than a learned approach to caregiving. Much fancy footwork takes place to make it seem that New Age mystical evocations of yin and yang, masculine and feminine androgyny, and so on, are not just the same old sexist stereotypes wrapped in more alluring and seductive packaging.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“A male who has divested of male privilege, who has embraced feminist politics, is a worthy comrade in struggle, in no way a threat to feminism, whereas a female who remains wedded to sexist thinking and behavior infiltrating feminist movement is a dangerous threat.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Men did care enough to struggle with our demands. And some cared enough to convert to feminist thinking and to change. But only a very, very few loved us – loved us all the way. And that meant respecting our sexual rights. To this day I believe that feminist debate about love and sexuality ended precisely because straight women did not want to face the reality that it was highly unlikely in patriarchal society that a majority of men would wholeheartedly embrace women’s right to say no in the bedroom. Since the vast majority of heterosexual women, even those involved in radical feminist movement, were not willing to say no when they did not want to perform sexually for the fear of upsetting or alienating their mate, no significant group of men ever had to rise to the occasion. While it became more acceptable to say no now and then, it was not acceptable to say no for any significant amount of time. An individual woman in a primary relationship with a man could not say no, because she feared there was always another woman in the background who could take her place, a woman who would never say no.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Most men and women born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. Had I been evaluating my relationships from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds. 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.... Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“No other group in America has used black people as metaphors as extensively as white women involved in the women’s movement.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance".”
― bell hooks