bell hooks > Quotes

“In the late fifties and sixties, our nation had not yet become a place where the poor would be regarded solely with contempt. In the growing up years of my life, my siblings and I were constantly told that it was a sin to place ourselves above others. We were taught that material possessions told you nothing about the inner life of another human being, whether they were a loving, a person of courage and integrity. We were told to look past material trappings and find the person inside.”
― bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters

“If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“love does not bring an end to difficulties, it gives us the strength to cope with difficulties in a constructive way.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“When greedy consumption is the order of the day, dehumanization becomes acceptable. Then, treating people like objects is not only acceptable but is required behavior.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love. In some cases when we are making the slow journey back from lovelessness to love, our suffering may become more intense. Acceptance of pain is part of loving practice.”
― bell hooks

“Throughout her chapter, whenever she offers an example of individuals who use essentialist standpoints to dominate discussion, to silence others via their invocation of the “authority of experience,” they are members of groups who historically have been and are oppressed and exploited in this society. Fuss does not address how systems of domination already at work in the academy and the classroom silence the voices of individuals from marginalized groups and give space only when on the basis of experience it is demanded.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“The message given males is that to be honest is to be “soft.” The ability to be dishonest and indifferent to the consequences makes a male hard, separates the men from the boys.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. We need a revolutionary vision of black liberation, one that emerges from a feminist standpoint and addresses the collective plight of black people.”
― bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

“Commitment is inherent in any genuinely loving relationship....”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Before many of us can effectively sustain engagement in organized resistance struggle, in black liberation movement, we need to undergo a process of self-recovery that can heal individual wounds that may prevent us from functioning fully.”
― bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

“In his work Thich Nhat Hanh always speaks of the teacher as a healer.”
― bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

“the poems repeat sorrow sounds, connecting the pain of a historical Kentucky landscape ravaged by war and all human conditions that are like war.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Trust is the heartbeat of genuine love. And we trust that the attention our partners give friends, or vice versa, does not take anything away from us—we are not diminished.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“There has been no other movement for social justice in our society that has been as self-critical as feminist movement. Feminist willingness to change direction when needed has been a major source of strength and vitality in feminist struggle. That internal critique is essential to any politics of transformation. Just as our lives are not fixed or static but always changing, our theory must remain fluid, open, responsive to new information.”
― bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

“While careers and making money remain important agendas, they never take precedence over valuing and nurturing human life and well-being.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“The choice to love is a choice to connect—to find ourselves in the other.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“individuals feeling connected to someone through the process of cathecting insist that they love the other person even if they are hurting or neglecting them. Since their feeling is that of cathexis, they insist that what they feel is love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Lifestyle feminism ushered in a 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.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless—our beings defined and interpreted by others.”
― bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“Consumer culture in particular encourages lies. Advertising is one of the cultural mediums that has most sanctioned lying. Keeping people in a constant state of lack, in perpetual desire, strengthens the marketplace economy. Lovelessness is a boon to consumerism.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“spirits bring contentment for a time carry us closer to the sacred moving through bitterness our yearning to hold on to moments of ecstasy where we imagine we hear clearly destiny calling”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Aesthetics then is more than a philosophy or theory of art and beauty; it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming. It is not organic. I grew up in an ugly house. No one there considered the function of beauty or pondered the use of space. Surrounded by dead things, whose spirits had long ago vanished since they were no longer needed, that house contained a great engulfing emptiness. In that house things were not to be looked at, they were to be possessed — space was not to be created but owned — a violent anti-aesthetic. I grew up thinking about art and beauty as it existed in our lives, the lives of poor black people. Without knowing the appropriate language, I understood that advanced capitalism was affecting our capacity to see, that consumerism began to take the place of that predicament of heart that called us to yearn for beauty. Now many of us are only yearning for things.”
― bell hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“La sororidad nunca habría sido posible a través de las fronteras de raza y clase si las mujeres individualmente no hubieran estado dispuestas a desprenderse de su poder para dominar y explotar a grupos subordinados de mujeres.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Hopefulness empowers us to continue our work for justice even as the forces of injustice may gain greater power for a time.” (xiv)”
― bell hooks, Teaching Community

“Many women cannot hear male pain about love because it sounds like an indictment of female failure. Since sexist norms have taught us that loving is our task whether in our role as mothers or lovers or friends, if men say they are not loved, then we are at fault; we are to blame.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“When I was a child, it was clear to me that life was not worth living if we did not know love. I wish I could testify that I came to this awareness because of the love I felt in my life. But it was love's absence that let me know how much love mattered.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Boys brutalized and victimized by patriarchy more often than not become patriarchal, embodying the abusive patriarchal masculinity that they once clearly recognized as evil. Few men brutally abused as boys in the name of patriarchal maleness courageously resist the brainwashing and remain true to themselves. Most males conform to patriarchy in one way or another.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“To take the inherent positive sexuality of males and turn it into violence is the patriarchal crime that is perpetuated against the male body, a crime that masses of men have yet to possess the strength to report.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“While the will to love is present in very young children, they still need guidance in the ways of love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions