bell hooks > Quotes

“Shame makes self-acceptance and self-love impossible.”
― bell hooks, Salvation: Black People and Love

“So many of us have felt that we could win male love by showing we were willing to bear the pain, that we were willing to live our lives affirming that the maleness deemed truly manly because it withholds, withdraws, refuses is the maleness we desire. We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real “men.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“I was in my mid-twenties when I first learned to understand love "as the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Compassion opens the way for individuals to feel empathy for others without judgment.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“When poetry stirs in my imagination it is almost always from an indirect place, where language is abstract, where the mood and energy is evocative of submerged emotional intelligence and experience.”
― bell hooks, Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“Just as white women had publicly disavowed any political connection with black people when they believed that such an alliance was inimical to their interests, black women disassociated themselves from feminist struggle when they were convinced that to appear feminist, i.e. radical, would hurt the cause of black liberation.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“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, All About Love: New Visions

“Trust is the foundation of intimacy. When lies erode trust, genuine connection cannot take place.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Intense spiritual and emotional lack in our lives is the perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption. In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Sharing [the truth] with him affirmed my loyalty and respect for his capacity to cope with reality.”
― Bell Hooks

“Those feminist activists who refuse to accept men as comrades in struggle — who harbor irrational fears that if men benefit in any way from feminist politics women lose — have misguidedly helped the public view feminism with suspicion and disdain.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Every day on our television screens and in our nation's newspapers we are brought news of continued male violence at home and all around the world. When we hear that teenage boys are arming themselves and killing their parents, their peers, or strangers, a sense of alarm permeates our culture. Folks want to have answers. They want to know, Why is this happening? Why so much killing by boy children now, and in this historical moment? Yet no one talks about the role patriarchal notions of manhood play in teaching boys that it is their nature to kill, then teaching them that they can do nothing to change this nature -- nothing, that is, that will leave their masculinity intact.”
― bell hooks

“Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”
― bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

“Certainly, for black women, our struggle has not been to emerge from silence into speech but to change the nature and direction of our speech, to make a speech that compels listeners, one that is heard.”
― Bell Hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black

“Shaming is one way to intimidate and break the spirit.”
― bell hooks, Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem

“Although it is not impossible, it is very difficult and rare for us to be able to extend unconditional love to others, largely because we cannot exercise control over the behavior of someone else and we cannot predict or utterly control our responses to their actions. We can, however, exercise control over our own actions. We can give ourselves the unconditional love that is the grounding for sustained acceptance and affirmation. When we give this precious gift to ourselves, we are able to reach out to others from a place of fulfillment and not from a place of lack.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Women's liberationists, white and black, will always be at odds with one another as long as our idea of liberation is based on having the power white men have.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman

“fear stands in the way of love”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Feminism has been used as a psychological tool to make women think that work they might otherwise see as boring, tedious, and time consuming is liberating. For whether feminism exists or not, women must work.”
― bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

“Clearly, much of the violence in domestic life, both physical and verbal abuse, is linked to job misery. We can encourage friends and loved ones to move toward greater self-love by supporting them in any effort to leave work that assaults their well-being.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Let's face the reality that if OJ Simpson had been poor or even lower-middle-class there would have been no media attention. Justice was never a central issue. Our nation's tabloid passion to know about the lives of the rich made class a starting point.”
― bell hooks, Where We Stand: Class Matters

“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
― Bell hooks

“When women with class power opportunistically use a feminist platform while undermining feminist politics that helps keep in place a patriarchal system that will ultimately re-subordinate them, they do not just betray feminism; they betray themselves.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

“Self-love cannot flourish in isolation. It is no easy task to be self-loving.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“In a world without love the passion to connect can be replaced by the passion to possess.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“To know love we have to tell the truth to ourselves and to others. Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense. Breaking through this denial is always the first step in uncovering our longing to be honest and clear.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Erich Fromm, he defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Explaining further, he continues: “Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“We all must discover for ourselves that love is a force as real as gravity, and that being upheld in love every day, every hour, every minute is not a fantasy—it is intended as our natural state.”
― bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“Feminists are made, not born. One does not become an advocate of feminist politics simply by having the privilege of having been born female.”
― bell hooks, Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics