Authors:

A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
V
W
X
Y
Z

Bell Hooks Quotes - Page 6

All Quotes Abuse Acceptance Anarchy Art Awareness Belief Challenges Childhood Children Choices Commitment Community Compassion Country Criticism Culture Desire Diversity Effort Fate Feelings Feminism Focus Gender Giving Growth Heart Home Hurt Identity Imagination Integrity Justice Language Life Lifetime Loss Love Lying Oppression Pain Passion Patriarchy Prejudice Privacy Racism Rage Reading Reality Romantic Love School Self Esteem Self Love Sexism Shame Silence Sleep Soul Stress Struggle Students Suffering Teaching Understanding Vision War Writing

We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex

We live in a world with serious class complexes. It is one thing to be a college student with loan debts and another thing to be just dirt poor for your entire life. The challenge is to come up with more complex understandings of where we are, more global awareness of what connects Americans with what is happening with suffering and oppressed people all around the world.

College, Class, People

Source: bknation.org

Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.

Shame, Produce, Trauma

Relationships are treated like Dixie cups. They are the same. They are disposable. If it does not work, drop it, throw it away, get another. Committed bonds (including marriage) cannot last when this is the prevailing logic. Most of us are unclear about what to do to protect and strengthen caring bonds when our self-centered needs are not being met.

Caring, Self, Lasts

You must have courage to love, you have to have a profound will to do what is right to love, and it does not come easy.

Love You, Profound, Doe

"Building a Community of Love". Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh, plumvillage.org. January 1, 2000.

Secrets find a way out in sleep . . . It is the place where there is no pretense.

Sleep, Secret, Way

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.

Struggle, Moving, Voice

bell hooks (2014). “Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics”, p.160, Routledge

As more people of color raise our consciousness and refuse to be pitted against one another, the forces of neo-colonial white supremacist domination must work harder to divide and conquer.

Color, White, People

Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

Feminism, Movement, Oppression

"Feminism Is for Everybody". Book by Bell Hooks, 2000.

In patriarchal culture men are especially inclined to see love as something they should receive without expending effort. More often than not they do not want to do the work that love demands. When the practice of love invites us to enter a place of potential bliss that is at the same time a place of critical awakening and pain, many of us turn our backs on love.

Pain, Men, Practice

If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.

Party, Struggle, Emotional

bell hooks (2004). “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”, p.69, Simon and Schuster

The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.

Men, Distinction, Threat

bell hooks (2004). “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”, p.32, Simon and Schuster

The time has come to tell the truth. Again. There is no love without justice. Men and women who cannot be just deny themselves and everyone they choose to be intimate with the freedom to know mutual love. If we remain unable to imagine a world where love can be recognized as a unifying principle that can lead us to seek and use power wisely, then we will remain wedded to a culture of domination that requires us to choose power over love.

Men, Justice, Principles

My students tell me, we don't want to love! We're tired of being loving! And I say to them, if you're tired of being loving, then you haven't really been loving, because when you are loving you have more strength.

Tired, Loving You, Want

"Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh". www.lionsroar.com. March 24, 2017.

I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.

Struggle, Writing, Healing

bell hooks (2014). “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black”, p.20, Routledge

For most people, what is so painful about reading is that you read something and you don't have anybody to share it with. In part what the book club opens up is that people can read a book and then have someone else to talk about it with. Then they see that a book can lead to the pleasure of conversation, that the solitary act of reading can actually be a part of the path to communion and community.

Book, Reading, People

For black folks, the camera provided a means to document a reality that could, if necessary, be packed, stored, moved from place to place... [Photography] offered a way to contain memories, to overcome loss, to keep history.

Photography, Memories, Mean

We fear that evaluating our needs and then carefully choosing partners will reveal that there is no one for us to love. Most of us prefer to have a partner who is lacking than no partner at all. What becomes apparent is that we may be more interested in finding a partner than in knowing love.

Knowing Love, Needs, May

I still think it's important for people to have a sharp, ongoing critique of marriage in patriarchal society — because once you marry within a society that remains patriarchal, no matter how alternative you want to be within your unit, there is still a culture outside you that will impose many, many values on you whether you want them to or not.

Thinking, People, Important

"You Don’t Have to Wear White: Rethinking Those Disney-esque Marriage Traditions" by J.N. Salters, www.huffingtonpost.com. March 26, 2013.

This rule of silence is upheld when the culture refuses everyone easy access even to the word “patriarchy.” Most children do not learn what to call this system of institutionaliz ed gender roles, so rarely do we name it in everyday speech. This silence promotes denial. And how can we organize to challenge and change a system that cannot be named?

Children, Names, Silence

bell hooks (2004). “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.

Relationship, Pain, Commitment

Part of the racialized sexism wants everyone to think that a 15-year old Mexican is not a girl, she’s a woman. We know she’s a girl. We can never emphasize this enough, because this is the fate of colored girls globally right now: the denial of their girlhood, the denial of their childhood, and the constant state of risk and danger they are living in.

Girl, Fate, Thinking

Once you do away with the idea of people as fixed, static entities, then you see that people can change, and there is hope.

Ideas, People, Static

As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.

Reality, Men, Thinking

Individual heterosexual women came to the movement from relationships where men were cruel, unkind, violent, unfaithful. Many of these men were radical thinkers who participated in movements for social justice, speaking out on behalf of the workers, the poor, speaking out on behalf of racial justice. However when it came to the issue of gender they were as sexist as their conservative cohorts.

Men, Issues, Justice

bell hooks (2014). “Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics”, p.67, Routledge

Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix and transform.

Writing, Should, Performing

bell hooks (2013). “remembered rapture: the writer at work”, p.36, Macmillan

You May Also Like: