bell hooks > Quotes

“To this day I believe that feminist debate about love and sexuality ended precisely because straight women did not want to face the reality that it was highly unlikely in patriarchal society that a majority of men would whole-heartedly embrace women’s right to say no in the bedroom.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“A culture that is dead to love can only be resurrected by spiritual awakening.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow, and are empowered by the process. That empowerment cannot happen if we refuse to be vulnerable while encouraging students to take risks. Professors who expect students to share confessional narratives but who are themselves unwilling to share are exercising power in a manner that could be coercive. In my classrooms, I do not expect students to take any risks that I would not take, to share in any way that I would not share.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“When Audre Lorde made that much quoted yet often misunderstood cautionary statement warning us that "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," she was urging us to remember that we must engage in a process of visionary thinking that transcends the ways of knowing privileged by the oppressive powerful if we are to truly make revolutionary change.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“Peace is found not in the absence of challenge but in our own capacity to be with hardship without judgment, prejudice, and resistance.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The history of colonization, imperialism is a record of betrayal, of lies, and deceits. The demand for that which is real is a demand for reparation, for transformation. In resistance, the exploited, the oppressed work to expose the false reality - to reclaim and recover ourselves.”
― Bell Hooks

“Consider the way many Western women, white and Black, have confronted the issue of female circumcision in Africa and the Middle East. Usually these countries are depicted as 'barbaric and uncivilized,' the sexism there portrayed as more brutal and dangerous to women than sexism in the United States. A decolonized feminist perspective would first and foremost examine how sexist practices in relation to women's bodies globally are linked.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Sexual promiscuity and sexual liberation were not one and the same.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“There is much to celebrate about being old. I want to be old as soon as possible for I see the way the old ones live - free. They are free to be different - unique - distinct from one another. None of them are alike. Some of them were already on their way to being old when I was born. I do not know them young. I do not have to forgive them past mistakes. They have not caused me any sorrow. My grandfather tells me that all he ever wanted was for the world to leave him be, that it won't let you when you are a young man.”
― bell hooks, Bone Black

“If we succeed without confronting and changing shaking foundation of low self-esteem rooted in contempt of hatred, we will falter along the way.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Until black people, and our allies in love and struggle, become militant about how we are represented on television, in movies, and in books, we will not see imaginative work that offers images of black characters who love. If love is not present in our imaginations, it will not be there in our lives.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“nature as chameleon”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Writing is my passion. Words are the way to know ecstasy. Without them life is barren.”
― bell hooks

“Do not expect to receive love from someone else you do not give yourself”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“While masking was sometimes crucial to survival during the period of racial apartheid, those strategies destroy our capacity to be truth tellers when we adopt them in contemporary life.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“Attention is an important resource.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We can restore our hopw in a world that transcends race by building communities where self-esteem comes not from feeling superior to any group but from one's relationship to the land, to the people, to the place wherever that may be. When we create beloved community, environments that are anti-racist and inclusive, it need not matter whether those spaces are diverse. What matters is that should difference enter the world of beloved community it can find a place of welcome, a place to belong.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“The essence of true love is mutual recognition—two individuals seeing each other as they really are.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In the early stages of feminist movement we used the phrase “woman-identified woman” or “man-identified woman” to distinguish between those activists who did not choose lesbianism but who did choose to be woman-identified, meaning their ontological existence did not depend on male affirmation.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“I wanted to find my own identity and be autonomous at the same time that I wanted to find a mate who would rescue me, who would provide and protect. Of course I wanted to be able to provide for myself. Just in case that did not happen, I wanted the luxury of backup. I was not a free spirit. I wanted to blend old-fashioned values learned at home—which cautioned me to be conservative, take care, and be responsible—with New Age spirituality and radical ideas of freedom and choice. No matter how much I might have longed to free myself from a sense of responsibility to the collective good, to family and community, I was psychically bound. I had the strength to rebel, but I did not have the strength to let go. I was, like generations of women before me, split, torn between two competing identities—the longing to be the liberated, independent, sexually free woman and the desire to settle down and be domesticated.”
― bell hooks, Communion: The Female Search for Love

“In an ideal world we would all learn in childhood to love ourselves. We would grow, being secure in our worth and value, spreading love wherever we went, letting our light shine. If we did not learn self-love in our youth, there is still hope. The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken and call us back to the first memory of being the life force inside a dark place waiting to be born—waiting to see the light.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy.”
― bell hooks

“I have had the pain of fragmentation deeply impressed upon my consciousness. The alienation felt by many people who are concerned about domination – the struggle we have even to make of our words a language that can be shared, understood.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“It did not take long for this generation to find out that they loved material comfort more than justice. It was one thing to spend a few years doing without comfort to fight for justice, for civil rights for nonwhite people and women of all races, but it was quite another to consider a lifetime where one might face material lack or be compelled to share resources. When many of the radicals and/or hippies who had rebelled against excess privilege began to raise children, they wanted them to have the same access to material privilege they had known—as well as the luxury of rebelling against it; they wanted them to be materially secure.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Without trust there can be no genuine intimacy and love.”
― bell hooks

“. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Extolling the transformative power of love in his essay “Love and Need,” Merton writes: “Love is, in fact an intensification of life, a completeness, a fullness, a wholeness of life. . . . Life curves upward to a peak of intensity, a high point of value and meaning, at which all its latent creative possibility go into action and the person transcends himself or herself in encounter, response, and communion with another. It is for this that we came into the world—this communion and self-transcendence. We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love.” The teachings about love offered by Fromm, King, and Merton differ from much of today’s writing. There is always an emphasis in their work on love as an active force that should lead us into greater communion with the world. In their work, loving practice is not aimed at simply giving an individual greater life satisfaction; it is extolled as the primary way we end domination and oppression. This important politicization of love is often absent from today’s writing.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Now my feeling is that our hope lies in reality because the culture of empire--the capitalist, hedonistic patriarchal culture is driven by fantasy--an addiction to fantasy. To the extent that we can encourage and promote facing reality, we have concrete reasons to hope.”
― bell hooks, Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life

“The wrongminded notion of feminist movement which implied it was anti-male carried with it the wrongminded assumption that all female space would necessarily be an environment where patriarchy and sexist thinking would be absent. Many women, even those involved in feminist politics, chose to believe this as well.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“When I was approaching the age of forty and facing the type of cancer scares that have become so commonplace in women’s lives they are practically routine, my first thought as I waited for test results was that I was not ready to die because I had not yet found the love my heart had been seeking.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions