bell hooks Quotes

Any society based on domination supports and condones violence.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Live simply so that others may simply live.

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.

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.