bell hooks Quotes

98 Sourced Quotes

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

bell hooks
Move from emphasis on personal lifestyle issues toward creating political paradigms and radical models of social change that emphasize collective as well as individual change.

bell hooks
The soul of our politics is the commitment to ending domination.

bell hooks
Teaching Black Studies, I find that students are quick to label a black person who has grown up in a predominantly white setting and attended similar schools as "not black enough."...Our concept of black experience has been too narrow and constricting.

bell hooks
We need to interrogate "reverence," for idolization can be another way one is objectified and not really taken seriously.

bell hooks
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?

bell hooks
Imagine living in a world where there is no domination, where females and males are not alike or even always equal, but where a vision of mutuality is the ethos shaping our interaction.

bell hooks
I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions - a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom.

bell hooks
Like desire, language disrupts, refuses to be contained within boundaries.

bell hooks
Often in my lectures when I use the phrase imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy to describe our nation's political system, audiences laugh. No one has ever explained why accurately naming this system is funny. The laughter is itself a weapon of patriarchal terrorism.

bell hooks
Feminist solidarity rooted in a commitment to progressive politics must include a space for rigorous critique, for dissent, orwe are doomed to reproduce in progressive communities the very forms of domination we seek to oppose.

bell hooks
Feminist politics aims to end domination, to free us to be who we are - to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.

bell hooks
White women and black men have it both ways. They can act as oppressor or... and oppression of others.

bell hooks
Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand in struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of "talking back" that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice.

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

bell hooks
Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.

bell hooks
In our young minds houses belonged to women were their special domain, not as property, but as places where all that truly mattered in life took place - the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls. There we learned dignity, integrity of being; there we learned to have faith. The folks who made this life possible, who were our primary guides and teachers, were black women.

bell hooks
Like many white liberals, Ken sees the whiteness of his social life as more an accident of circumstance than a choice. He would welcome greater diversity in the neighbourhood. However, he does not consciously do enough work either in his social life or in the larger community to make that diversity possible.

bell hooks
One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..

bell hooks
People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities.

bell hooks
A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold on to life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we are able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.

bell hooks
I want there to be a place in the world where people can engage in one another's differences in a way that is redemptive, full of hope and possibility. Not this In order to love you, I must make you something else. That's what domination is all about, that in order to be close to you, I must possess you, remake and recast you.

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

bell hooks
Sexism has never rendered women powerless. It has either suppressed their strength or exploited it.

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

bell hooks
Black males who refuse categorization are rare, for the price of visibility in the contemporary world of white supremacy is that black identity be defined in relation to the stereotype whether by embodying it or seeking to be other than it…Negative stereotypes about the nature of black masculinity continue to overdetermine the identities black males are allowed to fashion for themselves.

bell hooks
Writing is my passion. It is a way to experience the ecstatic. The root understanding of the word ecstasy— to stand outside —comes to me in those moments when I am immersed so deeply in the act of thinking and writing that everything else, even flesh, falls away.

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

bell hooks
I believe that it is impossible for two individuals not committed to their own and each other's well being to sustain a healthy and enduring relationship.

bell hooks
Writing and the hope of writing pulls me back from the edges of despair. I believe insanity and despair are at times one and the same.

bell hooks