bell hooks > Quotes

“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

“There are times when so much talk or writing, so many ideas seem to stand in the way, to block the awareness that for the oppressed, the exploited, the dominated, domination is not just a subject for radical discourse, for books. It is about pain – the pain of hunger, the pain of over-work, the pain of degradation and dehumanization, the pain of loneliness, the pain of loss, the pain of isolation, the pain of exile... Even before the words, we remember the pain.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“As a society we are embarrassed by love. We treat it as if it were an obscenity. We reluctantly admit to it. Even saying the word makes us stumble and blush . . . Love is the most important thing in our lives, a passion for which we would fight or die, and yet we’re reluctant to linger over its names. Without a supple vocabulary, we can’t even talk or think about it directly. —DIANE ACKERMAN”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The only canons I formed in my mind were filled with the writers with whom I felt a soul inspiring resonance, the writers whose works were great to me because they gave me words, wisdom, and visions powerful enough to transform me and my world.”
― Bell Hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom

“To critique sexist images without offering alternatives is an incomplete intervention. Critique in and of itself does not lead to change.”
― bell hooks

“Lifestyle feminism ushered in the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women. Suddenly the politics was being slowly removed from feminism. And the assumption prevailed that no matter what a woman’s politics, be she conservative or liberal, she too could fit feminism into her existing lifestyle. Obviously this way of thinking has made feminism more acceptable because its underlying assumption is that women can be feminists without fundamentally challenging and changing themselves or the culture.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Once upon a time I thought it was a female thing, this fear of men. Yet when I began to talk with men about love, time and time again I heard stories of male fear of other males. Indeed, men who feel, who love, often hide their emotional awareness from other men for fear of being attacked and shamed. This is the big secret we all keep together—the fear of patriarchal maleness that binds everyone in our culture. We cannot love what we fear. That is why so many religious traditions teach us that there is no fear in love.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“True love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“I was taught that it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was in itself a silence.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“LOVE REDEEMS. DESPITE all the lovelessness that surrounds us, nothing has been able to block our longing for love, the intensity of our yearning. The understanding that love redeems appears to be a resilient aspect of the heart’s knowledge. The healing power of redemptive love lures us and calls us toward the possibility of healing.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In Lost Boys therapist James Garbarino testifies that when it comes to boys, “neglect is more common than abuse: more kids are emotionally abandoned than are directly attacked, physically or emotionally.” Emotional neglect lays the groundwork for the emotional numbing that helps boys feel better about being cut off. Eruptions of rage in boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for adolescent patriarchal mis-behavior, “Boys will be boys.” Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred, and oppression of women and men globally.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“For black females, and males too, that means learning about the myriad ways racism, sexism, class exploitation, homophobia, and various other structures of domination operate in our daily lives to undermine our capacity to be self-determining.”
― bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

“A lack of sustained love does not mean the absence of care, affection or pleasure”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Solidarity is not the same as support. To experience solidarity, we must have a community of interests, shared beliefs and goals around which to unite, to build Sisterhood. Support can be occasional. It can be given and just as easily withdrawn. Solidarity requires sustained, ongoing commitment.”
― bell hooks

“...there is no stigma attached to acknowledging a lack of love in one's primary relationships. And if one's goal is self-recovery, to be well in one's soul, honestly and realistically confronting lovelessness is part of the healing process.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“This same politics of greed is at play when folks seek love. They often want fulfillment immediately. Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know genuine love we must invest time and commitment.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When we are loving we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“There is no love without justice.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“But wherever they emerge from, middle class, working class, or underclass—if they are humble, it means they have already reached a certain level of moral maturity. Why? Because humility means two things. One, a capacity for self-criticism. And this is something that we do not have enough of in the Black community, and especially among Black leaders. The second feature is allowing others to shine, affirming others, empowering and enabling others. Those who lack humility are dogmatic and egotistical. And that masks a deep sense of insecurity. They feel the success of others is at the expense of their own fame and glory. If criticism is put forward, they are not able to respond to it. And this produces, of course, an authoritarian sensibility. This is part of our problem in terms of Black leadership, and humility requires maturity.”
― bell hooks, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

“...the more students recognize their own uniqueness and particularity, the more they listen.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“time is aboriginal eternal”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“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.”
― bell hooks

“Significantly, in future feminist movement we will spend less time critiquing patriarchal marriage bonds and expend more effort showing alternatives, showing the value of peer relationships which are founded on principles of equality, respect, and the belief that mutual satisfaction and growth are needed for partnerships to be fulfilling and lasting.”
― Bell Hooks

“Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It does not privilege women over men. It has the power to transform in a meaningful way all our lives. Most importantly, feminism is neither a lifestyle nor a ready-made identity or role one can step into.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“Greed is rightly considered a "deadly sin" because it erodes the moral values that encourage us to care for the common good. Greed violates the spirit of connectedness and community that is natural to human survival [...] replacing this awareness with harmful self-centeredness.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“It is silly, isn’t it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself.”
― bell hooks

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn't it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim "You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself" made clear sense. And I add, "Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“This experience of genuine love (a combination of care, commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect)”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In the early years of contemporary feminist movement, solidarity between women was often equated with the formation of "safe" spaces where groups of presumably like-minded women could come together, sharing ideas and experiences without fear of silencing or rigorous challenges. Groups sometimes disintegrated when the speaking of diverse opinion lead to contestation, confrontation, and out-and-out conflict. It was common for individual dissenting voices to be silenced by the collective demand for harmony. Those voices were at times punished by exclusion and ostracization. Before it became politically acceptable to discuss issues of race and racism within feminist circles, I was one of those "undesirable" voices. Always a devout advocate of feminist politics, I was, and am, also constantly interrogating and, if need be, harsh in my critique. I learned powerful lessons from hanging in there, continuing to engage in feminist movement even when that involvement was not welcomed. Significantly, I learned that any progressive political movement grows and matures only to the degree that it passionately welcomes and encourages, in theory and in practice, diversity of opinion, new ideas, critical exchange, and dissent.”
― bell hooks, Outlaw Culture

“Individual women who had once critiqued and challenged patriarchy re-aligned themselves with sexist men. Radical women who felt betrayed by the fierce negative competition between women often simply retreated”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics