bell hooks > Quotes

“Until all men cease to believe that someone other than themselves is required to respond to their sexual needs demanding sexual subordination of partners will continue.
A truly liberatory feminist sexual politic will always make the assertion of female sexual agency central. That agency cannot come into being when females believe their sexual bodies must always stand in the service of something else. Often professional prostitutes and women in everyday life hold up their free exchange of pussy for goods or services as an indication that they are liberated. They refuse to acknowledge the fact that whenever a woman prostitutes her body because she cannot satisfy material needs in other ways she risks forfeiting that space of sexual integrity where she controls her body.
Masses of heterosexual women remain unable to let go the sexist assumption that their sexuality must always be sought after by men to have meaning and value...Aging females, many of whom once advocated feminist change, often find that they must subscribe to sexist notions of femininity and sexual desirability in order to have any sexual contact with men whom they fear will trade them in for a younger model.”
― bell hooks

“changing our educational system so that schooling is not the site where students are indoctrinated to support imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy or any ideology, but rather where they learn to open their minds, to engage in rigorous study and to think critically.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“Through the practice of compassion and forgiveness, I was able to sustain my appreciation for her work and cope with the grief and disappointment I felt about the loss of this relationship. Practicing compassion enabled me to understand why she might have acted as she did and to forgive her. Forgiving means that I am able to see her as a member of my community still, one who has a place in my heart should she wish to claim it.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Death is among us. To see it always and only as a negative subject is to lose sight of its power to enhance every moment.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The vast majority of our professors lacked basic communication skills, they were not self-actualized, and they often used the classroom to enact rituals of control that were about domination and the unjust exercise of power. In these settings I learned a lot about the kind of teacher I did not want to become.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“As many black women/women of color saw white women from privileged classes benefiting economically more than other groups from reformist feminist gains, from gender being tacked on to racial affirmative action, it simply reaffirmed their fear that feminism was really about increasing white power. The most profound betrayal of feminist issues has been the lack of mass-based feminist protest challenging the government’s assault on single mothers and the dismantling of the welfare system.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“It was an accepted fact among black people that the leaders who were most revered and respected were men. Black activists defined freedom as gaining the right to participate as full citizens in American culture; they were not rejecting the value system of that culture. Consequently, they did not question the rightness of patriarchy.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Hence, 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

“To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Erotic attention often serves as the catalyst for an intimate connection between two people, but it is not a sign of love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We have to both acknowledge that the problem is patriarchy and work to end patriarchy. Terrence Real offers this valuable insight: “The reclamation of wholeness is a process even more fraught for men than it has been for women, more difficult and more profoundly threatening to the culture at large.” If men are to reclaim the essential goodness of male being, if they are to regain the space of openheartedness and emotional expressiveness that is the foundation of well-being, we must envision alternatives to patriarchal masculinity. We must all change.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“How different things might be if, rather than saying "I think I'm in love," we were saying "I've connected with someone in a way that makes me think I'm on the way to knowing love.." Or if instead of saying "I am in love" we said "I am loving" or "I will love.”
― bell hooks

“While emotional needs are difficult, and often are impossible to satisfy, material desires are easier to fulfill.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In today’s world we are taught to fear the truth, to believe it always hurts. We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“threads of power and domination a palimpsest of greed”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“By forcing black female slaves to perform the same work tasks as black male slaves, white male patriarchs were contradicting their own sexist order that claimed woman to be inferior because she lacked physical prowess. An explanation had to be provided to explain why black women were able to perform tasks that were cited by patriarchs as jobs women were incapable of performing. To explain the black female’s ability to survive without the direct aid of a male and her ability to perform tasks that were culturally defined as “male” work, white males argued that black slave women were not “real” women but were masculinized sub-human creatures.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Often professional prostitutes and women in everyday life hold up their free exchange of pussy for goods or services as an indication that they are liberated. They refuse to acknowledge the fact that whenever a woman prostitutes her body because she cannot satisfy material needs in other ways she risks forfeiting that space of sexual integrity where she controls her body.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“I think that one of the unspoken discomforts surrounding the way a discourse of race and gender, and sexual practice has disrupted the academy is precisely that mind/body split. Once we start talking in the classroom about the body and about how we live in our bodies, we’re automatically challenging the way power has orchestrated itself in that particular institutionalized space.The person who is most powerful has the privilege of denying their body….
I think part of why everyone in the culture, and students in general, have a tendency to see professors as people who don’t work is totally tied to that sense of the immobile body.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Most patriarchal fathers in our nation do not use physical violence to keep their sons in check; they use various techniques of psychological terrorism, the primary one being the practice of shaming. Patriarchal fathers cannot love their sons because the rules of patriarchy dictate that they stand in competition with their sons, ready to prove that they are the real man, the one in charge.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Fixating on wants and needs, which consumerism encourages us to do, promotes a psychological state of endless craving.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Most women involved in the recent move toward a feminist revolution assume that white women have initiated all feminist resistance to male chauvinism in American society, and further assume that black women are not interested in women’s liberation. While it is true that white women have led every movement toward feminist revolution in American society, their dominance is less a sign of black female disinterest in feminist struggle than an indication that the politics of colonization and racial imperialism have made it historically impossible for black women in the United States to lead a women’s movement.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Those men who accepted the myth that black women were matriarchs did regard black females as a threat to their personal power. Such thinking is not at all peculiar to black men. Most men in a patriarchal society fear and resent women who do not assume traditional passive roles. By shifting the responsibility for the unemployment of black men onto black women and away from themselves, white racist oppressors were able to establish a bond of solidarity with black men based on mutual sexism.”
― Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Psychoanalyst Carl Jung insightfully emphasized the truism that “where the will to power is paramount love will be lacking.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“American women have been socialized, even brainwashed, to accept a version of American history that was created to uphold and maintain racial imperialism in the form of white supremacy and sexual imperialism in the form of patriarchy. One measure of the success of such indoctrination is that we perpetuate both consciously and unconsciously the very evils that oppress us.”
― Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Batterer, he observes that there are few male models for grieving, and he emphasizes that “men in particular seem incapable of grieving and mourning on an individual basis.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“We do know that patriarchal masculinity encourages men to be pathologically narcissistic, infantile, and psychologically dependent on the privileges (however relative) that they receive simply for having been born male.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“What we were was emotionally needy, desperate for the recognition (whether from male or female partners) that would prove our worth, our value, our right to be alive on the planet, and we were willing to do anything to get it. As females in a patriarchal culture, we were not slaves of love; most of us were and are slaves of longing—yearning for a master who will set us free and claim us because we cannot claim ourselves.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“The rhetoric of feminism with its emphasis on resistance, rebellion, and revolution created an illusion of militancy and radicalism that masked the fact that feminism was in no way a challenge or a threat to capitalist patriarchy.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Lots of people learn how to lie in childhood. Usually they begin to lie to avoid punishment or to avoid disappointing or hurting an adult. How many of us can vividly recall childhood moments where we courageously practiced the honesty we had been taught to value by our parents, only to find that they did not really mean for us to tell the truth all the time. In far too many cases children are punished in circumstances where they respond with honesty to a question posed by an adult authority figure. It is impressed on their consciousness early on, then, that telling the truth will cause pain. And so they learn that lying is a way to avoid being hurt and hurting others.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“What has become clear is that education for critical consciousness coupled with anti-racist activism that works to change all our thinking so that we construct identity and community on the basis of openness, shared struggle, and inclusive working together offers us the continued possibility of eradicating racism.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place