bell hooks Quotations

There is no life to be found in violence. Every act of violence brings us closer to death. Whether it's the mundane violence we do to our bodies by overeating toxic food or drink or the extreme violence of child abuse, domestic warfare, life-threatening poverty, addiction, or state terrorism.

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

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

I have always been a flirt. My mother says whe I was a child, I used to stand outside the house and just smile at everyone who walked by. Like, 'Please take me with you!'

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.

Why is it that many contemporary male thinkers, especially men of color, repudiate the imperialist legacy of Columbus but affirm dimensions of that legacy by their refusal to repudiate patriarchy?

To live fixated on the future is to engage in psychological denial. It is a form of psychic violence that prepares us to accept the violence needed to ensure the maintenance of imperialist, future-oriented society.

Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.

A major part of love is commitment. If we are committed to someone, if I'm committed to loving you, then it's not possible for me to 'fall out of love.'

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.

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.

I think life experiences are different for people who know what they want as children.

I can be standing in Barneys with my coat and purse and my selections, and some white woman will say, 'Can you get this in my size?' What she sees is a black woman, and her service button goes off.

I feel that my environment reflects my belief in the grace and art and elegance of living simply.

Since anti-racist individuals did not control mass media, the media became the primary tool that would be used and is still used to convince black viewers, and everyone else, of black inferiority.

I've written 18 books, mostly dealing with issues of social justice, ending racism, feminism, and cultural criticism.

I thought about how we need to make children feel that there are times in their lives when they need to be alone and quiet and to be able to accept their aloneness.

An often-repeated assertion in the body of film criticism I have written is the assertion that movies do not just mirror the culture of any given time; they also create it.

In general, the mass media tell us that black people are not loving, that our lives are so fraught with violence and aggression that we have no time to love.

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

For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?

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.

Whenever women struggle with breast cancer and face better care than ever, that's feminism.

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

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.

I love my family, even as I critique their dysfunctionalities.

No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

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

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

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.

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

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.

In this culture, the phrase 'black woman' is not synonymous with 'tender,' or 'gentle.' It's as if those words couldn't possibly speak to the reality of black females.

It's in the act of having to do things that you don't want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.

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.

I'm such a girl for the living room. I really like to stay in my nest and not move. I travel in my mind, and that that's a rigorous state of journeying for me. My body isn't that interested in moving from place to place.

I have been thinking about the notion of perfect love as being without fear, and what that means for us in a world that's becoming increasingly xenophobic, tortured by fundamentalism and nationalism.

Every terrorist regime in the world uses isolation to break people's spirits.

You can only realize change if you live simply. Once people want enormous excess, you can hardly do social change.

Certainly we can end racism with love. We can demand that the federal government change its emphasis on racial distinction.

These days I wonder more and more why people are pessimistic when American history actually supports optimism.

Class is more than money. Class is also about knowledge.

I think I was always obsessed with esthetics.

Death is with you all the time; you get deeper in it as you move towards it, but it's not unfamiliar to you. It's always been there, so what becomes unfamiliar to you when you pass away from the moment is really life.

I think the number one thing Black women and all Black people should be paying attention to is our health.

I think the Women's movement has had a major impact on everybody's lives in our nation and in the world as a whole.

There is a lushness to how my mind works.

All over the world, young males and females, schooled in the art of patriarchal thinking, are building an identity on a foundation that sees the will to do violence as the essential way to assert being.

Some people act as though art that is for a mass audience is not good art, and I think this has been a very negative thing. I know that I have wanted very much to write books that are accessible to the widest audience possible.

What's really sad is that so many young women between the ages of 16 and 25 are ignorant and they already believe that women get the same pay as men. They don't even really understand that equality hasn't happened with the pay force.

Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn't want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.

I don't think you can hate anything that you know intimately. There is no fine line separating love from hate because there's a deep chasm separating love from hate.

I feel like there is always something trying to pull us back into sleep, that there is this sort of seductive quality in all the hedonistic pleasures that pull on us.

I have created a life style that supports contemplation, service to words.

All the men I fall for seem to have a commitment problem.

Blacks who lack a proper killing rage are merely victims.

It really fascinates me what white people are allowed to write about.

The ethic of liberal individualism has so deeply permeated the psyches of blacks... of all classes that we have little support for a political ethic of communalism that promotes the sharing of resources.

The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things, led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one's viewpoint.

The working-class black Southern Christian culture I come from still nurtures me, and I mean directly, daily.

I get so tired of people acting like, you know, black men and women never help each other, never support each other.

The people I love, I'm committed to loving for the rest of my life.

I told my parents when I was 12 I'd be a writer.

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.

Readers forget that one can critique yet still admire.

Clearly, commitment is a necessary component for creating loving relationships.

The greater our commitment, the more likely our love will last.

I can be critical of Beyoncé and yet also appreciate aspects of her power and representation. I can especially critique the way white supremacist aesthetics more often than not informs her presentation of self and yet still acknowledge her beauty.

One difference with the political writings, whether about feminism or class, is that the intent is to change how people think of a certain political reality; whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there.

Love is first and foremost exemplified by action - by practice - not solely by feeling.

I think this is often misunderstood in the West, where people feel that there can be no justice unless everything is the same. This is part of why I feel we have to relearn how we think about love, because we think about love so much in terms of the self.

I think this is what people misunderstand about Martin Luther King saying to love your enemies. They think he was just using this silly little phrase, but what he meant was that as Black Americans we need to let our anger go, because holding on to it we hold ourselves down. We oppress ourselves by holding on to anger.

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.

The fact is that it was bourgeois white feminism that I was reacting against when I stood in my first women's studies classes and said, "Black women have always worked."

My focus has always been on the work - that work being critical thinking and writing. I am always doing that. That's where I am, wherever I am. Critical thinking and writing as my heartbeat.

If you're in a domestic situation where the man is violent, patriarchy and male domination - even though you understand it intersectionally - you focus, you highlight that dimension of it, if that's what is needed to change the situation.

To me, a woman can't be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness.

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.

Justice is possible without equality, I believe, because of compassion and understanding. If I have compassion, then if I have more than you, which is unequal, I will still do the just thing by you.

It's really important to have life strategies and part of that is sort of knowing where you want to go so you can have a map that helps you to get there. And the traditional way tells us oh we get into school and someone else advises us, helps us, but that often does not work for African Americans female and male. Because what works for the dominant culture often does not work for us.

A good teacher is someone who can help you to get back to a teacher within.

Part of why I have started writing about love is feeling that our culture is forgetting what Martin Luther King taught. We name more and more streets and schools after him but that's almost irrelevant, because what is to be remembered is that strength to love.

A very hurting thing for Black Americans - to feel that we can't love our enemies. People forget what a great tradition we have as African-Americans in the practice of forgiveness and compassion. And if we neglect that tradition, we suffer.

What's so amazing about this historical moment is that it is bringing class to the fore and we have to think about the nature of work and hierarchy.

Feminism as a theoretical enterprise is approached differently by Black women depending on where we are. There are more reformist Black women who tend to use the phrase "Black feminism".

I feel sad that we have allowed these knee-jerk feminists who want to act like it's a struggle against men...but again that's the least politically developed strand of feminism.

Feminism as a political movement has to specifically address the needs of men in their struggle to revolutionize their consciousness.

I have been contemplating the place and meaning of love in our lives and culture for years. When a subject attracts my intellectual and emotional imagination, I am long to observe it from all angles, to know it inside and out.

Radical militant feminist believes that women of color and Black women in particular have written the cutting edge theory and really were the individuals who exploded feminist theory into the directions that has made it more powerful. So I see us as the leaders not just of Black people and Black women in terms of feminism but in terms of the movement as a whole.

When I write provocative social and cultural criticism that causes readers to stretch their minds, to think beyond set paradigms, I think of that work as love in action. While it may challenge, disturb and at times even frighten or enrage readers, love is always the place where I begin and end.

When I began to think deeply about the metaphysics of love I talked with everyone around me about it. I talked to large audiences and even had wee one-on-one conversations with children about the way they think about love. I talked about love in every state. I talked about love everywhere I traveled.

Often girls feel deeply cared about as small children but then find as we develop willpower and independent thought that the world stops affirming us, that we are seen as unlovable.

When we are more energized by the practice of blaming than we are by efforts to create transformation, we not only cannot find relief from suffering, we are creating the conditions that help keep us stuck in the status quo

Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.

As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.

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

Time and time again when I talk to individuals about approaching love with will and intentionality, I hear the fear expressed that this will bring an end to romance. This is simply not so. Approaching romantic love from foundation of care, knowledge, and respect actually intensifies romance

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself.