Selected Quotes by bell hooks
"The feminist call was for women to embrace ways of seeing beauty and adorning ourselves that are healthy, life-affirming, and not overly time-time consuming."
bell hooks, Sex
"Most feminist groups began with women talking about how we saw ourselves and other women, how we acted. We openly confessed our fears and hatred of other women. We talked about how to combat jealousy, the politics of envy, and so on."
bell hooks, Sex
"The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity."
bell hooks, Sex
"People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities."
bell hooks, Confidence
"My thoughts have been shaped by the conviction that feminism must become a mass based political movement if it is to have a revolutionary, transformative impact on society."
bell hooks, Sex
"There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few."
bell hooks, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness."
bell hooks, Intelligence/Wisdom
"The ability to critique oneself and change and to hear critique from others is the condition of being that makes us capable of responsibility."
bell hooks, Life
"Being oppressed means the absence of choices."
bell hooks, Freedom
"When we love children, we acknowledge by our every action that they are not property, that they have rights - that we respect and uphold their rights."
bell hooks, Society
"To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination."
bell hooks, Society
"We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they’re beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved."
bell hooks, Society, Technology
"Yesterday I was thinking about the whole idea of genius and creative people, and the notion that if you create some magical art, somehow that exempts you from having to pay attention to the small things."
bell hooks, Intelligence/Wisdom, Arrogance
"What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe."
bell hooks, Life
"The moment we choose to love, we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others."
bell hooks, Love, Freedom
"All too often in our society it is assumed that one can know all there is to know about black people by merely hearing the life story and opinions of one black person."
bell hooks, Society
"The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged."
bell hooks, Anger and Fighting, Society
"To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination."
bell hooks, Freedom
"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, Love
"Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power - not because they don't see it, but because they see it and they don't want it to exist."
bell hooks, Power, Society
"But love is really more of an interactive process. It’s about what we do not just what we feel. It’s a verb, not a noun."
bell hooks, Love
"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, Love
"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."
bell hooks, Love
"Usually adult males who are unable to make emotional connections with the women they choose to be intimate with are frozen in time, unable to allow themselves to love for fear that the loved one will abandon them."
bell hooks, Love
"The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression."
bell hooks, Love, Freedom
"Of all the definitions of love that abound in our universe, a special favorite of mine is...“the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."
bell hooks, Love
"Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other."
bell hooks, Love
"Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust."
bell hooks, Love
"To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us."
bell hooks, Love
"True love is a different story. When it happens, individuals usually feel in touch with each other's core identity."
bell hooks, Love
"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, Love
"Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives."
bell hooks, Love, Life
"What we cannot imagine cannot come into being."
bell hooks, Goals
"I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance."
bell hooks, Freedom
"Justice demands integrity."
bell hooks, Justice
"In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress."
bell hooks, Freedom
"The white worker who has been displaced at General Motors has more in common with the displaced black worker than those larger white CEO's, and those Wall Street people who are determining their fate...whose thievery and greed is determining their fate."
bell hooks, Business
"If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue."
bell hooks, Life
"I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that's a rigorous state of journeying for me."
bell hooks, Intelligence/Wisdom
"Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair."
bell hooks, Hope, Society
"If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice."
bell hooks, Justice
"Abuse and neglect negate love. Care and affirmation, the opposite of abuse and humiliation, are the foundation of love. No one can rightfully claim to be loving when behaving abusively."
bell hooks, Love
"One of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone."
bell hooks, Life
"To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality."
bell hooks, Goals
"To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial."
bell hooks, Life
"I think the truth is that finding ourselves brings more excitement and well-being than anything romance has to offer, and somewhere we know that."
bell hooks, Love
"True resistance begins with people confronting pain...and wanting to do something to change it."
bell hooks, Goals
"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, Love
"Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice."
bell hooks, Life
"When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment."