bell hooks > Quotes

“The presence of pain in our lives is not an indicator of dysfunction.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Living by a love ethic we learn to value loyalty and a commitment to sustained bonds over material advancement.”
― 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. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively. Yet parents do this al the time in our culture. Children are told that they are loved even though they are being abused.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“It is not just men who do not take their pain seriously. Most women do not want to deal with male pain if it interferes with the satisfaction of female desire. When feminist movement led to men’s liberation, including male exploration of “feelings,” some women mocked male emotional expression with the same disgust and contempt as sexist men. Despite all the expressed feminist longing for men of feeling, when men worked to get in touch with feelings, no one really wanted to reward them.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.”
― Bell Hooks

“WHEN I WAS a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered. I was my father’s first daughter.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The truth is, far too many people in our culture do not know what love is. And this not knowing feels like a terrible secret, a lack that we have to cover up.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Healthy families resolve conflict without coercion, shaming, or violence.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The overall impact of postmodernism is that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of sense of grounding even if it is not informed by shared circumstance.”
― Bell Hooks

“For many men the moment of violent connection may be the only intimacy, the only attainable closeness, the only space where the agony is released.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream that dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community.”
― bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“While it is positive for young black males and females to learn discipline and self-responsibility, those attitudes, values, and habits of being can be taught with pedagogical strategies that are liberatory, that do not rely on coercive control and punishment to reinforce positive behavior.”
― bell hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism

“Initially when feminist leaders in the United States proclaimed the need for gender equality here they did not seek to find out if corresponding movements were taking place among women around the world. Instead they declared themselves liberated and therefore in the position to liberate their less fortunate sisters, especially those in the “third world.” This neocolonial paternalism had already been enacted to keep women of color in the background so that only conservative/liberal white women would be the authentic representatives of feminism.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“To me feminism is not simply a struggle to end male chauvinism or a movement to ensure that women will have equal rights with men; it is a commitment to eradicating the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels—sex, race, and class, to name a few—and a commitment to reorganizing U.S. society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“White feminists did not challenge the racist-sexist tendency to use the word "woman" to refer solely to white women; they supported it. For them it serves two purposes. First, it allowed them to proclaim white men world oppressors while making it appear linguistically that no alliance existed between white women and white men based on shared racial imperialism. Second, it made it possible for white women to act as if alliances did exist between themselves and non-white women in our society, and by so doing they could deflect attention away from their classism and racism. Had feminists chosen to make explicit comparisons between the status of white women and that of black people, or more specifically the status of black women and white women, it would have been more than obvious that the two groups do not share an identical oppression. It would have been obvious that similarities between the women under patriarchy and that of any slave or colonized person do not necessarily exist in a society that is both racially and sexually imperialistic. In such a society, the woman who is seen as inferior because of her sex, can also be seen as superior because of her race, even in relationship to men of another race. Because feminists tended to evoke an image of women as a collective group, their comparisons between "women" and "blacks" were accepted without question. This constant comparison of the plight of "women" and "blacks" deflected attention away from the fact that black women were extremely victimized by both racism and sexism - a fact which, had it been emphasized, might have diverted public attention away from the complaints of middle and upper class white feminists.”
― Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“making soil soup deep”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Boys learn to cover up grief with anger; the more troubled the boy, the more intense the mask of indifference. Shutting down emotionally is the best defense when the longing for connection must be denied.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“It is so easy for all of us to forget the service women give to others in everyday life — the sacrifices women make. Often, sexist thinking obscures the fact that these women make a choice to serve, that they give from the space of free will and not biological destiny. There are plenty of folks who have no interest in serving, who disparage service. When anyone thinks a woman who serves "gives 'cause that's what mothers or real women do" they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts. There are lots of women who are not interested in service, who even look down on it.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don’t have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community”
― Bell Hooks

“We cannot fully create effective movements for social change if individuals struggling for that change are not also self-actualized or working towards that end. When wounded individuals come together in groups to make change our collective struggle it is often undermined by all that has not been dealt with emotionally.”
― bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

“Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” Since the choice must be made to nurture growth, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Echoing the work of Erich Fromm, he defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We must all decolonize our minds in Western culture to be able to think differently about nature, abut the destuction humans cause.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“To bring a love ethic to every dimension of our lives, our society would need to embrace change.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Madness, not just physical abuse, was the punishment for too much talk if you were female. Yet even as this fear of madness haunted me, hanging over my writing like a monstrous shadow, I could not stop the words making thought, writing speech. For this terrible madness which I feared, which I was sure was the destiny of daring women born to intense speech (after all, the authorities emphasized this point daily), was not as threatening as imposed silence, as suppressed speech.”
― Bell Hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“We cannot teach boys that "real men" either do not feel or do not express feelings, then expect boys to feel comfortable getting in touch with their feelings.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“To be true to patriarchy we are all taught that we must keep men’s secrets.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“At the center of the way black male selfhood is constructed in white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy is the image of the brute—untamed, uncivilized, unthinking, and unfeeling.”
― Bell Hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

“And if one’s goal is self-recovery, to be well in one’s soul, honesty and realistically confronting loneliness is party of the healing process.”
― bell hooks