bell hooks Quotes

98 Sourced Quotes

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.

bell hooks
To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin.

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

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

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
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
It is no accident that this homeplace, as fragile and as transitional as it may be, a makeshift shed, a small bit of earth where one rests, is always subject to violation and destruction. For when a people no longer have the space to construct homeplace, we cannot build a meaningful community of resistance.

bell hooks
It is a distortion of the notion of romantic love to want to see obedience as the quintessential expression of respect.

bell hooks
There are times when personal experience keeps us from reaching the mountain top and so we let it go because the weight of it is too heavy. And sometimes the mountain top is difficult to reach with all our resources, factual and confessional, so we are just there, collectively grasping, feeling the limitations of knowledge, longing together, yearning for a way to reach that highest point. Even this yearning is a way to know.

bell hooks
Yearning is the word that best describes a common psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of race, class, gender, and sexual practice.

bell hooks
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.

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

bell hooks
Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels.

bell hooks
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

bell hooks
A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women.

bell hooks
Feminist thinking teaches us all, especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life.

bell hooks
Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Its aim is not to benefit solely any specific group of women, any particular race or class of women. It does not privilege women over men. It has the power to transform meaningfully all our lives

bell hooks
Often their rage erupts because they believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all just people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of sameness even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think.

bell hooks
Class is rarely talked about in the United States; nowhere is there a more intense silence about the reality of class differences than in educational settings.

bell hooks
My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.

bell hooks
The world demands that you work for it, make families, provide, take no time to listen to your own heart beating.

bell hooks
No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough.

bell hooks
Only grown-ups think that the things children say come out of nowhere. We know they come from the deepest parts of ourselves.

bell hooks
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.

bell hooks
When we only name the problem, when we state complaint without a constructive focus or resolution, we take hope away. In this way critique can become merely an expression of profound cynicism, which then works to sustain dominator culture.

bell hooks
When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognize the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.

bell hooks
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.

bell hooks
The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.

bell hooks
Sadly, children's passion for thinking often ends when they encounter a world that seeks to educate them for conformity and obedience only.

bell hooks
Why is it so difficult for many white folks to understand that racism is oppressive not because white folks have prejudicial feelings about blacks (they could have such feelings and leave us alone) but because it is a system that promotes domination and subjugation?

bell hooks