Bell Hooks Quotes

The idealized woman becomes property, symbol, and ornament; she is stripped of her essential human qualities. The devalued woman becomes a different kind of object; she is the spittoon in which men re...

There can be no love without justice.

This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny. Whenever women thinkers, especially advocates of feminism, speak about the widespread problem of male violence, folks are eag...

To be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti-human in nature, as it is to be a victim.

To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy, we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.

We are told again and again by patriarchal mass media, by sexist leaders, that feminism is dead, that it no longer has meaning. In actuality, females and males of all ages, everywhere, continue to gra...

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...

We see in movies, people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. [...] t...

Whether they are able to enact it as lived practice or not, many white folks active in anti-racist struggle today are able to acknowledge that all whites (as well as everyone else within white suprema...

While it is positive for young black males and females to learn discipline and self-responsibility, those attitudes, values, and habits of being can be taught with pedagogical strategies that are libe...

White people who want people of color to do the work for them, who want us to draw the map and then carry them on our back down the road that ends racism are still playing out the servant/served parad...

Young people are cynical about love. Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.

When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as an escape.

Critically intervene in a way that challenges and changes.

A genuine feminist politics always brings us from bondage to freedom, from lovelessness to loving... There can be no love without justice.

A shift in class values occurs in black life when integration comes and with it the idea that money is the primary marker of individual success, not how one acquires money. Adopting that worldview cha...

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.

All awakening to love is spiritual awakening

All efforts at self-transformation challenge us to engage in on-going, critical self-examination and reflection about feminist practice, and about how we live in the world. This individual commitment,...

And when we love, we know love will last. Significantly, we know, having learned through much trial and error, that true love begins with self-love. And that time and time again our search for love br...