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“Let's not kid ourselves, we find mutual love only when we know how to love. And the best place to start practicing the art of love is with the self--that body, mind, heart, and soul that we can most know and change.
The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourselves. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin....rather than embracing faulty thinking that encourages us to believe that females are inherently loving, we make the choice to become loving. Choosing love, we affirm our agency, our commitment to personal growth, our emotional openness.”
bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love
“...it is the most militant, most radical intervention anyone can make to not only speak of love, but to engage in the practice of love. For love as the foundation of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love we are doing the work of ending domination.”
bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom
“…consider New Age logic, which suggests that the poor have chosen to be poor, have chosen their suffering. Such thinking removes from all of us who are privileged the burden of accountability.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom and our hope.”
Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
“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.”
bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place
“Women have not proven that they care enough about the hearts of men, about their emotional well-being, to challenge patriarchy on behalf of those men with whom they want to know love. We read self-help books that tell us all the time that we cannot change anyone, and this is a useful truism. It is however equally true that when we give love, real love—not the emotional exchange of I will give you what you want if you give me what I want, but genuine care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust—it can serve as the seductive catalyst for change.”
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
“Since our society continues to be primarily a "Christian" culture masses of people continue to believe that god has ordained that women be subordinate to men in the domestic household.”
Bell Hooks
“The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What could be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfranchised black folks might rise any day now make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a documentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited black folks, are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.”
Bell Hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
“When men did most of the work women worked to make home a site of comfort and relaxation for males. Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present. When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure.”
bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
“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, All About Love: New Visions
“Those who choose to walk on love's path are well served if they have a guide. That guide can enable us to overcome fear if we trust that they will not lead us astray or abandon us along the way.”
Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Self-acceptance is hard for many of us. There is a voice inside that is constantly judging, first ourselves and then others.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“No wonder then that men who cared, who were open to change, often just gave up, falling back on the patriarchal masculinity they found so problematic. The individual men who did take on the mantle of a feminist notion of male liberation did so only to find that few women respected this shift. Once the 'new man' that is the man changed by feminism was represented as a wimp, as overcooked broccoli dominated by powerful females who were secretly longing for his macho counterpart, masses of men lost interest.”
bell hooks
“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.”
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
“Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling. In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“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.”
bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
“To Black women, the issue is not whether white women are more or less racist than white men, but that they are racist. If women committed to feminist revolution, be they Black or white, are to achieve any understanding of the charged connections between white women and Black women, we must first be willing to examine woman’s relationship to society, to race, and to American culture - as it is, and not as we would ideally have it be. That means confronting the reality of white female racism. Sexist discrimination has prevented white women from assuming the dominant role in the perpetuation of white racial imperialism, but it has not prevented white women from absorbing, supporting, and advocating racist ideology or acting individually as racist oppressors in various spheres of American life. Every women’s movement in America, from its earliest origin to the present day, has been built on a racist foundation, a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political ideology. The racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and early 20th century American life was mirrored in the women’s rights movement. The first white women’s rights advocates were never seeking social equality for all women. They were seeking social equality for white women.”
bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
“The "we" evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves that negates that there is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.”
bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation
“To me the family has always been that place of familiarity that holds and hurts us.”
Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place
tags: family
“We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real “men.”
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
“We are told again and again by patriarchal mass media, by sexist leaders, that feminism is dead, that it no longer has meaning. In actuality, females and males of all ages, everywhere, continue to grapple with the issue of gender equality, continue to seek roles for themselves that will liberate rather than restrict and confine; and they continue to turn towards feminism for answers. Visionary feminism offers us hope for the future. By emphasizing an ethics of mutuality and interdependency feminist thinking offers us a way to end domination while simultaneously changing the impact of inequality. In a universe where mutuality is the norm, there may be times when all is not equal, but the consequence of that inequality will not be subordination, colonization, and dehumanization. Feminism”
bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
“Cynicism is the greatest barrier to love. It is rooted in doubt and despair. Fear intensifies our doubt. It paralyzes. Faith and hope allow us to let go. Fear stands in the way of love.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Spirituality and spiritual life gives us the strength to love.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“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.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Love and abuse cannot co-exist.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“We spend a lifetime undoing the damage caused by cruelty, neglect, and all manner of lovelessness experienced in our families of origin and in relationships where we simply where we simply did not know what to do.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“Naming oppressive realities, in and of itself, has not brought about the kinds of changes for oppressed groups that it can for more privileged groups, who command a different quality of attention.”
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
“It is my deep belief that in talking about the past, in understanding the things that have happened to us we can heal and go forward. Some people believe that it is best to put the past behind you, to never speak about the events that have happened that have hurt or wounded us, and this is their way of coping —but coping is not healing. By confronting the past without shame we are free of its hold on us.”
bell hooks, Teaching Community
“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love--starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.”
bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions
“When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat”
bell hooks

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All About Love: New Visions All About Love
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The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love The Will to Change
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Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation, #2) Communion
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