Bell Hooks Quotes

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

I think Black people need to take self-esteem seriously.

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.

It is important and vital is to keep that education for critical consciousness around intersectionalities, so that people are able to not focus on one thing and blame one group, but be able to look holistically at the way intersectionality informs all of us: whiteness, gender, sexual preferences, etc. Only then can we have a realistic handle on the political and cultural world we live within.

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.

Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.

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.

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

It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.

It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cause you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history.

My work is mostly influenced by the concrete circumstances of our daily lives.

My idea of a delicious time is to read a book that is wonderful. But the ruling passion of my life is being a seeker after truth and the divine.

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.

In our culture privacy is often confused with secrecy. Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to. Keeping secrets is usually about power, about hiding and concealing information.

If we give our children sound self-love, they will be able to deal with whatever life puts before them.

If we move away from either/or thinking, and if we think, okay, every day of my life that I walk out of my house I am a combination of race, gender, class, sexual preference and religion or what have you, what gets foregrounded?

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

Without justice there can be no love.

We don't really live in a culture that loves boys or loves children, and we don't encourage boys to be whole.

Spirituality and spiritual life give us the strength to love.

Lying has become so much the accepted norm that people lie even when it would be simpler to tell the truth.

When we work with love we renew the spirit; that renewal is an act of self-love, it nurtures our growth.

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

Both men and women remain in dysfunctional, loveless relationships when it is materially opportune.

In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.

Feminist education — the feminist classroom — is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.

Few people who are hit once by someone they love respond in the way they might to a singular physical assault by a stranger.

To the extent that we live in a postmodern world and it shapes the concrete circumstances of our daily lives, I would say postmodernism affects my work or influences my work.

The notion that black folks have nothing to learn from scholarship that may reflect racial or racist biases is dangerous. It promotes closed-mindedness and a narrow understanding of knowledge to hold that "race" is such an overwhelming concept that it negates the validity of any insights contained in a work that may have some racist or sexist aspects.

I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

Many spiritual teachers - in Buddhism, in Islam - have talked about first-hand experience of the world as an important part of the path to wisdom, to enlightenment.

The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.

One of the things that we must do as teachers is twirl around and around, and find out what works with the situation that we're in. Our models might not work. And that twirling, changing, is part of the empowerment.

In 2014, when Hillary Clinton was not yet running for president, I stated that I was not in agreement with her politics. More recently, when asked my thoughts about Hillary Clinton during a public conversation with Gloria Steinem, I stated, "she embodies the very best of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't vote for her."

If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.

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.

Since the notion that we should all forsake attachment to race and/or cultural identity and be “just humans” within the framework of white supremacy has usually meant that subordinate groups must surrender their identities, beliefs, values, and assimilate by adopting the values and beliefs of privileged-class whites, rather than promoting racial harmony this thinking has created a fierce cultural protectionism.

To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

One of the greatest difficulties the left faces in reaching out to masses of people in America is its profound disrespect of spirituality and religious life…people on the left need to acknowledge – we need to grapple with – the question of religion.

Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.

I feel that I have many real students whom I have not met. Many are in cloisters and they never get out. Others are in prison. But in many cases they practice the teachings much better than those who meet me every day.

You have to trust that if you are calling my name in a way that is offensive to me, I'm going to share it with you. But you also have to know what your feelings are behind calling me "bell."

Another response to racism has been the establishment of unlearning racism workshops, which are often led by white women. These workshops are important, yet they tend to focus primarily on cathartic individual psychological personal prejudice without stressing the need for corresponding change in political commitment and action. A woman who attends an unlearning racism workshop and learns to acknowledge that she is racist is no less a threat than one who does not. Acknowledgment of racism is significant when it leads to transformation.

Whether we learn how to love ourselves and others will depend on the presence of a loving environment. Self-love cannot flourish in isolation.

I entered the classroom with the conviction that it was crucial for me and every other student to be an active participant, not a passive consumer...education as the practice of freedom.... education that connects the will to know with the will to become. Learning is a place where paradise can be created.

Dare I speak ,to oppressed and opressor in the same voice? Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination- a language, that will not bind you, fence you in, or hold you? Language is also a place of struggle. The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance. Language is also a place of struggle.

If Black women stand strong and our commitment is to ending domination I know that I'm supporting Black males, Black children male and female Black elderly because the bottom line is the struggle to end domination in all its forms.