Bell Hooks Quotes

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.

The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.

[O]ne of the most vital ways we sustain ourselves is by building communities of resistance, places where we know we are not alone.

The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.

As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.

What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe.

The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.

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.

Shaming is one of the deepest tools of imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy because shame produces trauma and trauma often produces paralysis.

True resistance begins with people confronting pain... and wanting to do something to change it.

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.

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.

Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice, have recognition for difference without attaching difference to privilege.

Because we have learned to believe negativity is more realistic, it appears more real than any positive voice.

You are not going to destroy this imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy by creating your own version of it.

Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.

Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.

If we want a beloved community, we must stand for justice.

To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.

I began writing a book on love because I felt that the United States is moving away from love.

The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom.

If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.

To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.

Honesty and openness is always the foundation of insightful dialogue.

Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is.

When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better.

Without justice there can be no love.

The true teacher is within us. A good teacher is someone who can help you to go back and touch the true teacher within, because you already have the insight within you.

What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

Only grown-ups think that the things children say come out of nowhere. We know they come from the deepest parts of ourselves.

I think our culture doesn't recognize passion, because real passion has the power to disrupt boundaries.

..Critically intervene in a way that challenges and changes.

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.

I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.

Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.

America is a country that would rather talk about race than class.

All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.

I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else's whim or to someone else's ignorance.

The world demands that you work for it, make families, provide, take no time to listen to your own heart beating.

Most of us did not learn when we were young that our capacity to be self-loving would be shaped by the work we do and whether that work enhances our well-being.

Being oppressed means the absence of choices

What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.

The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.

Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it.

The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.

The transformative power of love is not fully embraced in our society because we often wrongly believe that torment and anguish are our ‘natural’ condition.

Love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.