bell hooks > Quotes

“To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Political solidarity between women always undermines sexism and sets the stage for the overthrow of patriarchy.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“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. These lessons are usually taught to males by other males and sexist mothers. Even boys raised in the most progressive, loving households, where parents encourage them to express emotions, learn a different understanding about masculinity and feelings on the playground, in the classroom, playing sports, or watching television. They may end up choosing patriarchal masculinity to be accepted by other boys and affirmed by male authority figures.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The only genuine hope of feminist liberation lies wth a vision of social change which challenges class elitism.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat. When we choose to love we choose to move against fear—against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The word “love” is most often defined as a noun, yet all the more astute theorists of love acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“I think one of the most wonderful books that Martin Luther King wrote was Strength to Love. I always liked it because of the word 'strength,' which counters the Western notion of love as easy. Instead, Martin Luther King said that you must have courage to love, that you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, that it does not come easy.”
― bell hooks

“Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as “natural,” and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“There can be no freedom for black men as long as they advocate subjugation of black women. There can be no freedom for patriarchal men of all races as long as they advocate subjugation of women.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Support of sexist oppression in much political writing concerned with revolutionary struggle as well as in the actions of men who advocate revolutionary politics undermines all liberation struggle. In many countries wherein people are engaged in liberation struggle, subordination of women by men is abandoned as the crisis situation compels men to accept and acknowledge women as comrades in struggle, e.g., Cuba, Angola, and Nicaragua. Often when the crisis period has passed, old sexist patterns emerge, antagonism develops, and political solidarity is weakened. It would strengthen and affirm the praxis of any liberation struggle if a commitment to eradicating sexist oppression were a foundation principle shaping all political work.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“The heartbeat of our alternative vision is still a fundamental and necessary truth: there can be no love when there is domination. Feminist thinking and practice emphasize the value of mutual growth and self-actualization in partnerships and in parenting. This vision of relationships where everyone’s needs are respected, where everyone has rights, where no one need fear subordination or abuse, runs counter to everything patriarchy upholds about the structure of relationships.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice. Once we begin to replace negative thinking with positive thinking, it becomes utterly clear that, far from being realistic, negative thinking is absolutely disenabling.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Young girls and adolescents will not know that feminist thinkers acknowledge both the value of beauty and adornment if we continue to allow patriarchal sensibilities to inform the beauty industry in all spheres. Rigid feminist dismissal of female longings for beauty has undermined feminist politics. While this sensibility is more uncommon, it is often presented by mass media as the way feminists think. Until feminists go back to the beauty industry, go back to fashion, and create an ongoing, sustained revolution, we will not be free. We will not know how to love our bodies as ourselves.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“This nameless angel gave Kubler-Ross the most valuable lesson of her life, telling her: "Death is not a stranger to me. He is an old, old acquaintance." It takes courage to befriend death. We find that courage in life through loving.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“44.
fly high
dreaming bird
higher and higher
on the wire of time
no road blocks
no stopping
to think through
why wings flap
what makes
the worthy soar
only this
pure heaven
right now
sky high”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“When women internalized the idea that describing their own woe was synonymous with developing a critical political consciousness, the progress of the feminist movement was stalled.”
― bell hooks

“For example, I am disturbed when all the courses on black history or literature at some colleges and universities are taught solely by white people, not because I think that they cannot know these realities but that they know them differently.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“Like all great mysteries, we are all mysteriously called to love no matter the conditions of our lives, the degree of our depravity or despair. The persistence of this call gives us reason to hope.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Every day, when I drink water or take a dish from the cupboard, I stand before this reminder that we yearn for love—that we seek it—even when we lack hope that it really can be found.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When despair prevails we cannot create life-sustaining communities of resistance.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“In everyday life males and females alike are relatively silent about love. Our silence shields us from uncertainty. We want to know love. We are simply afraid the desire to know too much about love will lead us closer and closer to the abyss of lovelessness.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus on resolution, we take away hope.”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope

“To live fully we would need to let go of our fear of dying.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Phobic fear is not a solution to the problem of sexual exploitation or rape. It is a symptom.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Every day thousands of children in our culture are verbally and physically abused, starved, tortured, and murdered. They are the true victims of intimate terrorism in that they have no collective voice and no rights. They remain the property of parenting adults to do with as they will. There can be no love without justice. Until we live in a culture that not only respects but also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know love. In our culture the private family dwelling is the one institutionalized sphere of power that can easily be autocratic and fascistic. As absolute rulers, parents can usually decide without any intervention what is best for their children. If children’s rights are taken away in any domestic household, they have no legal recourse. Unlike women who can organize to protest sexist domination, demanding both equal rights and justice, children can only rely on well-meaning adults to assist them if they are being exploited and oppressed in the home.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The longing for love and the movement of love is underneath all of our activities”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Feminist movement is pro-family.”
― Bell Hooks

“I was torn between my desire to follow the dictates of my inner self and my distrust of that self.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love