bell hooks > Quotes

“No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“At times women find it difficult to hear what men have to say when what they tell us does not conform to our fantasies of who they are or who we want them to be.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“White feminists so focused on the disparity between white male/white female economic status as an indication of the negative impact of sexism that they drew no attention to the fact that poor and lower-class men are as able to oppress and brutalize women as any other group of men in American society.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling. When we feel deeply drawn to someone, we cathect with them; that is, we invest feelings or emotion in them.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To practice the art of loving we have first to choose love--admit to ourselves that we want to know love and be loving even if we do not know what that means. The deeply cynical, who have lost all belief in love's power, have to step blindly out on faith.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In the chapter titled “How We Can Have Better Relationships with the Women in Our Lives,” Stoltenberg writes: “Loving justice between a man and a woman does not stand a chance when other men’s manhood matters more. When a man has decided to love manhood more than justice, there are predictable consequences in all his relationships with women. . . . Learning to live as a man of conscience means deciding that your loyalty to the people whom you love is always more important than whatever lingering loyalty you may sometimes feel to other men’s judgment on your manhood.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“As victims of child abuse via socialization in the direction of the patriarchal ideal, boys learn that they are unlovable. According to [therapist John] Bradshaw, they learn that "relationships are based on power, control, secrecy, fear, shame, isolation, and distance." These are the traits often admired in the patriarchal adult man.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“I asked students once: "Why do you feel that the regard I extend to a particular student cannot also be extended to each of you? Why do you think there is not enough love or care to go around?”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“We refuse to allow either/or thinking to cloud our judgment. We embrace the logic of both/and. We acknowledge the limits of what we know.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“Many working men in our culture can barely read or write. Imagine if time away from work could be spent in exciting literacy programs for poor and working-class men. Imagine a wage offered for this work of self-development. When patriarchy no longer rules the day, it will be possible for men to view themselves holistically, to see work as part of life, not their whole existence.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Much as I enjoy popular New Age commentary on love, I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Erasing the agrarian past wherein black folks worked the land, sustained our lives by growing and tending crops, was a way to deny that there were any aspects of life in the white supremacist South that was positive. At the end of nineteenth century the cultural myths that made freedom synonymous with materialism necessarily denied the dignity of any agrarian based life style.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Given the changing realities of class in our nation, widening gaps between the rich and poor, and the continued feminization of poverty, we desperately need a mass-based radical feminist movement that can build on the strength of the past, including the positive gains generated by reforms, while offering meaningful interrogation of existing feminist theory that was simply wrongminded while offering us new strategies.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“The principle of equality, which is at the core of democratic values, has very little meaning in a world in which global oligarchy is taking over.”
― Bell Hooks

“...if we think of the natural landscapes that surround us as simply, blank slates, existing for humans to act upon them according to our will then we cannot exist in life sustaining harmony with the earth.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“The exciting aspect of creating a classroom community where there is respect for individual voices is that there is infinitely more feedback because students do feel free to talk — and talk back. And, yes, often this feedback is critical. Moving away from the need for immediate affirmation was crucial to my growth as a teacher. I learned to respect that shifting paradigms or sharing knowledge in new ways challenges; it takes time for students to experience that challenge as positive.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“It in no way diminishes our concern about racist oppression for us to acknowledge that our human experience is so complex that we cannot understand it if we only understand racism. Fighting against sexist oppression is important for black liberation, for as long as sexism divides black women and men we cannot concentrate our energies on resisting racism.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“If black males are socialized from birth to embrace the notion that their manhood will be determined by whether or not they can dominate and control others and yet the political system they live within (imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy) prevents most of them from having access to socially acceptable positions of power and dominance, then they will claim their patriarchal manhood, through socially unacceptable channels. They will enact rituals of blood, of patriarchal manhood by using violence to dominate and control.”
― Bell Hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

“Supporting what in effect became white power reformist feminism enabled the mainstream white supremacist patriarchy to bolster its power while simultaneously undermining the radical politics of feminism.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“If improving conditions in the workplace for women had been a central agenda for feminist movement in conjunction with efforts to obtain better paying jobs for women and finding jobs for unemployed women of all classes, feminism would have been seen as a movement addressing the concerns of all women.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“When white women talked about “Women as Niggers,” “The Third World of Women,” “Woman as Slave,” they evoked the sufferings and oppressions of non-white people to say “look at how bad our lot as white women is, why we are like niggers, like the Third World.” Of course, if the situation of upper and middle class white women were in any way like that of the oppressed people in the world, such metaphors would not have been necessary. And if they had been poor and oppressed, or women concerned about the lot of oppressed women, they would not have been compelled to appropriate the black experience. It would have been sufficient to describe the oppression of woman’s experience. A white woman who has suffered physical abuse and assault from a husband or lover, who also suffers poverty, need not compare her lot to that of a suffering black person to emphasize that she is in pain.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“When feminist women told the world that patriarchy promotes woman-hating, the response was that feminists were being too extreme, exaggerating the problem. Yet when men who knew nothing about feminism claimed that feminists were man-hating, there was no response from the nonfeminist world saying that they were being too extreme. No feminists have murdered and raped men. Feminists have not been jailed day after day for their violence against men. No feminists have been accused of ongoing sexual abuse of girl children, including creating a world of child pornography featuring little girls. Yet these are some of the acts of men that led some feminist women to identify men as woman-hating.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“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. Trust is the foundation of intimacy. When lies erode trust, genuine connection cannot take place. While men who dominate others can and do experience ongoing care, they place a barrier between themselves and the experience of love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Again and again a man would tell me about early childhood feelings of emotional exuberance, of unrepressed joy, of feeling connected to life and to other people, and then a rupture happened, a disconnect, and that feeling of being loved, of being embraced, was gone. Somehow the test of manhood, men told me, was the willingness to accept this loss, to not speak it even in private grief. Sadly, tragically, these men in great numbers were remembering a primal moment of heartbreak and heartache: the moment that they were compelled to give up their right to feel, to love, in order to take their place as patriarchal men.”
― Bell Hooks

“Any time a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries in order to love, the lives of women, men, and children are fundamentally changed for the better.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Many of our nation’s citizens are afraid to embrace an ethics of compassion because it threatens their security.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Much of what has been perceived by whites as an Amazonic trait in black women has been merely stoical acceptance of situations we have been powerless to change.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Liberation of the Spirit

As a girl, touched by the mystical dimensions of Christian faith, I felt the presence of the Beloved in my heart: the oneness of our life. At that time, when I had not yet learned the right language, I knew only that despite the troubles of my world, the suffering I witnessed around and within me, there was always available a spiritual force that could lift me higher, that could give me moments of transcendent bliss wherein I could surrender all thought of the world and know profound peace.
Early on, my heart had been touched by its delight. I knew its rapture. Early on, I made a commitment to be a seeker on the path: a seeker after truth. I was determined to live a life in the spirit. The black theologian James Cone says that our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived:

'If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to prepare for it; for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.'

In reflecting on my youth, I emphasize the mystical dimension of the Christian faith because it was that aspect of religious experience that I found to be truly liberatory. The more fundamental religious beliefs that were taught to me urging blind obedience to authority and acceptance of oppressive hierarchies-- this didn't move me. no, it was those mystical experiences that enabled me to understand and recognize the realm of being in a spiritual experience that transcends both authority and law.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“The term matriarch implies the existence of a social order in which women exercise social and political power, a state which in no way resembles the condition of black women or all women in American society. The decisions that determine the way in which black women must live their lives are made by others, usually white men. If sociologists are to casually label black women matriarchs, they should also label female children playing house and acting out the role of mother matriarchs. For in both instances, no real effective power exists that allows the females in question to control their own destiny.”
― Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism