bell hooks > Quotes

“While feminists in the United States were right to call attention to the need for global equality for women, problems arose as those individual feminists with class power projected imperialist fantasies onto women globally, the major fantasy being that women in the United States have more rights than any group of women globally, are “free” if they want to be, and therefore have the right to lead feminist movement and set feminist agendas for all the other women in the world, particularly women in third world countries. Such thinking merely mirrors the imperialist racism and sexism of ruling groups of Western men.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Significantly, I am among those rare feminist theorists who believe that it is crucial for feminist movement to have as an overriding agenda ending all forms of violence.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Advancing the notion that there can be many "feminisms" has served the conservative and liberal political interests of women seeking status and privileged class power who were among the first group to use the term "power feminists." They also were the group that began to suggest that one could be feminist and anti-abortion. This another misguided notion. Granting women the civil right to have control over our bodies is a basic feminist principle. Whether an individual female should have an abortion is purely a matter of choice. It is not anti-feminist for us to choose not to have abortions. But it is a feminist principle that women should have the right to choose.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Throughout American history, the racial imperialism of whites has supported the custom of scholars using the term “women” even if they are referring solely to the experience of white women.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Nature was th eplace where one could escape the world of man made constuctions of race and identity.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“Not only do we want to rescue our mothers but also we want to change our destiny so we will never suffer the way they did or do.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Working with students and families from diverse class backgrounds, I am constantly amazed at how difficult it is to cross boundaries in this white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society. And it is obviously most difficult for individuals who lack material privilege or higher levels of education to make the elaborate shifts in location, thought, and life experience cultural critics talk and write about as though it is only a matter of individual will.”
― Bell Hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations

“The first responsibility of love is to listen. We cannot learn to communicate deeply until we learn to listen: to each other, but also to ourselves and to God.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“For black men of all ages it is more acceptable to express rage than to give voice to emotional needs.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“In the precapitalist world, patriarchy allowed all men to completely rule women in their families, to decide their fate, to shape their destiny. Men could freely batter women with no fear of punishment. They could decide whom their daughters were to marry, whether they would read or write, etc. Many of these powers were lost to men with the development of the capitalist nation-state in the United States. This loss of power did not correspond with decreased emphasis on the ideology of male supremacy. However, the idea of the patriarch as worker, providing for and protecting his family, was transformed as his labor primarily benefited the capitalist state.
Men not only no longer had complete authority and control over women; they no longer had control over their own lives. They were controlled by the economic needs of capitalism. As workers, most men in our culture (like working women) are controlled, dominated. Unlike working women, working men are fed daily a fantasy diet of male supremacy and power. In actuality, they have very little power and they know it. Yet they do not rebel against the economic order nor make revolution. They are socialized by ruling powers to accept their dehumanization and exploitation in the public world of work and they are taught to expect that the private world, the world of home and intimate relationships, will restore to them their sense of power which they equate with masculinity. They are taught that they will be able to rule in the home, to control and dominate, that this is the big pay-off for their acceptance of an exploitative economic social order. By condoning and perpetuating male domination of women to prevent rebellion on the job, ruling male capitalists ensure that male violence will be expressed in the home and not in the work force.
The entry of women into the work force, which also serves the interests of capitalism, has taken even more control over women away from men. Therefore men rely more on the use of violence to establish and maintain a sex role hierarchy in which they are in a dominant position. At one time, their dominance was determined by the fact that they were the sole wage earners. Their need to dominate women (socially constructed by the ideology of male supremacy) coupled with suppressed aggression towards employers who "rule" over them make the domestic environment the center of explosive tensions that lead to violence. Women are the targets because there is no fear that men will suffer or be severely punished if they hurt women, especially wives and lovers. They would be punished if they violently attacked employers, police officers.
Black women and men have always called attention to a "cycle of violence" that begins with psychological abuse in the public world wherein the male worker may be subjected to control by a boss or authority figure that is humiliating and degrading. Since he depends on the work situation for material survival, he does not strike out or oppose the employer who would punish him by taking his job or imprisoning him. He suppresses this violence and releases it in what I call a "control" situation, a situation where he has no need to fear retaliation, wherein he does not have to suffer as a consequence of acting violently. The home is usually this control situation and the target for his abuse is usually female. Though his own expression of violence against women stems in part from the emotional pain he feels, the pain is released and projected onto the female. When the pain disappears he feels relief, even pleasure. His pain is gone even though it was not confronted or resolved in a healthy way. As the psychology of masculinity in sexist societies teaches men that to acknowledge and express pain negates masculinity and is a symbolic castration, causing pain rather than expressing it restores men's sense of completeness, of wholeness, of masculinity.”
― bell hooks

“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. Privileged women, many of whom call themselves feminists, have simply turned away from the “feminization of poverty.”
― bell hooks

“It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response.”
― bell hooks

“The free thinking and non-conformist behavior encouraged in the backwoods was a threat to imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy hence the need to undermine them by creating the notion that folks who inhabited these spaces were ignorant, stupid, inbred, ungovernable. By dehumanizing the hillbilly, the anarchist spirit which empowered poor folks to choose a lifestyle different from that of the state and so called civilized society could be crushed. And if not totally crushed, at least made to appear criminal or suspect”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We knew that there could no real sisterhood between white women and women of color if white women were not able to divest of white supremacy, if feminist movement were not fundamentally anti-racist.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“We cannot know love if we remain unable to surrender our attachment to power, if any feeling of vulnerability strikes terror in our hearts”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“From the moment little boys are taught they should not cry or express hurt, feelings of loneliness, or pain, that they must be tough, they are learning how to mask true feelings. In worst-case scenarios they are learning how to not feel anything ever.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Just as the 19th century conflict over black male suffrage versus woman suffrage had placed black women in a difficult position, contemporary black women felt they were asked to choose between a black movement that primarily served the interests of black male patriarchs and a women’s movement which primarily served the interests of racist white women.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Our cultural obsession with death consumes energy that could be given to the art of loving.”
― bell hooks

“It is far too easy to stay stuck in simply describing, telling one’s story over and over again, which can be a way of holding on to grief about the past or holding on to a narrative that places blame on others.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions: 1

“When we can see ourselves as we truly are and accept ourselves, we build on the necessary foundation for self-love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When I first began looking at gender issues, I believed that violence was a by-product of boyhood socialization. But after listening more closely to men and their families, I have come to believe that violence is boyhood socialization. The way we “turn boys into men” is through injury: We sever them from their mothers, research tells us, far too early. We pull them away from their own expressiveness, from their feelings, from sensitivity to others. The very phrase “Be a man” means suck it up and keep going. Disconnection is not fallout from traditional masculinity. Disconnection is masculinity.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Running fron the pain, they never know the fullness of love's pleasure.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“She wanted me to bear witness, to hear again both the naming of her pain and the power that emerged when she felt the hurt go away.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Yet when we commit to true love, we are committed to being changed, to being acted upon by the beloved in a way that enables us to be more fully self-actualized. This commitment to change is chosen. It happens by mutual agreement. Again and again in conversations the most common vision of true love I have heard shared was one that declared it to be “unconditional.” True love is unconditional, but to truly flourish it requires an ongoing commitment to constructive struggle and change.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“All other spiritual teachings are in vain if we cannot love. Even the most exalted states and the most exceptional spiritual accomplishments are unimportant if we cannot be happy in the most basic and ordinary ways, if, with our hearts, we cannot touch one another and the life we have been given. What matters is how we live. - Jack Kornfield”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Feminist politics is losing momentum because feminist movement has lost clear definitions. We have those definitions. Let's reclaim them. We can share the simple yet powerful message that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Love in patriarchal culture was linked to notions of possession, to paradigms of domination and submission wherein it was assumed one person would give love and another person receive it. Within patriarchy heterosexist bonds were formed on the basis that women being the gender in touch with caring emotions would give men love, and in return men, being in touch with power and aggression, would provide and protect. Yet in so many cases in heterosexual families men did not respond to care: instead they were tyrants who used their power unjustly to coerce and control.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Uniting the search for love with the quest to be free was the crucial step. Searching for love, I found the path to freedom. Learning how to be free was the first step in learning to know love.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by. In large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions