Top 500 Bell Hooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “The desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” – Fromm.”

— Bell Hooks

452. “There is only one emotion that patriarchy values when expressed by men; that emotion is anger. Real men get mad.”

— Bell Hooks

453. “Emotionally shut-down black males are often represented as epitomizing desirable masculinity.”

— Bell Hooks

454. “Any time a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries in order to love, the lives of women, men, and children are fundamentally changed for the better.”

— Bell Hooks

455. “And to the slave, the master’s way of life represents the ideal free lifestyle.”

— Bell Hooks

456. “The presence of pain in our lives is not an indicator of dysfunction.”

— Bell Hooks

457. “I was taught that it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was in itself a silence.”

— Bell Hooks

458. “Women’s liberationists, white and black, will always be at odds with one another as long as our idea of liberation is based on having the power white men have.”

— Bell Hooks

459. “Society’s collective fear of love must be faced if we are to lay claim to a love ethic that can inspire us and give us the courage to make necessary changes.”

— Bell Hooks

460. “Commitment to a love ethic transforms our lives by offering us a different set of values to live by. In large and small ways, we make choices based on a belief that honesty, openness, and personal integrity need to be expressed in public and private decisions.”

— Bell Hooks

461. “Patriarchy is a political-social system that insists that males are inherently dominating, superior to everything and everyone deemed weak, especially females, and endowed with the right to dominate and rule over the weak and to maintain that dominance through various forms of psychological terrorism and violence.”

— Bell Hooks

462. “Seeking to heal the wounds inflicted by patriarchy, we have to go to the source. We have to look at males directly, eye to eye, and speak the truth that the time has come for males to have a revolution of values. We cannot turn our hearts from boys and men, then ponder why the politics of war continues to shape our national policy and our intimate romantic lives.”

— Bell Hooks

463. “Men cannot change if there are no blueprints for change.”

— Bell Hooks

464. “Fixating on wants and needs, which consumerism encourages us to do, promotes a psychological state of endless craving.”

— Bell Hooks

465. “False notions of love teach us that it is the place where we will feel no pain, where we will be in a state of constant bliss. We have to expose the falseness of these beliefs to see and accept the reality that suffering and pain do not end when we begin to love.”

— Bell Hooks

466. “Feminism has been used as a psychological tool to make women think that work they might otherwise see as boring, tedious, and time consuming is liberating. For whether feminism exists or not, women must work.”

— Bell Hooks

467. “When men are able to assume an equal role with women as caregivers, it becomes most evident that they can nurture as well as women.”

— Bell Hooks

468. “When anyone thinks a woman who serves “gives ‘cause that’s what mothers or real women do,” they deny her full humanity and thus fail to see the generosity inherent in her acts.”

— Bell Hooks

469. “Most men are on quest for the ready-made perfect woman because they basically feel that problems in a relationship can’t be worked out. When the slightest thing goes wrong, it seems easier to bolt than talk.”

— Bell Hooks

470. “Speaking becomes both a way to engage in active self-transformation and a rite of passage where one moves from being object to being subject. Only as subjects can we speak. As objects, we remain voiceless – our beings defined and interpreted by others.”

— Bell Hooks

471. “No male successfully measures up to patriarchal standards without engaging in an ongoing practice of self-betrayal.”

— Bell Hooks

472. “Most American women, particularly white women, have not decolonized their thinking either in relation to the racism, sexism, and class elitism they hold towards less powerful groups of women in this society or the masses of women globally.”

— Bell Hooks

473. “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. It functions as a disclaimer, discounting the significance of what is being named. It suggests that the words themselves are problematic and not the system they describe.”

— Bell Hooks

474. “Many of our nation’s citizens are afraid to embrace an ethics of compassion because it threatens their security.”

— Bell Hooks

475. “Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, either boys act out or they implode. Very few boys are taught to express with words what they feel, when they feel it. And even when boys are able to express feelings in early childhood, they learn as they grow up that they are not supposed to feel and they shut down.”

— Bell Hooks

476. “I would like heterosexual women to be as actively curious about how and why and when they became heterosexual as I have been about how and why and when I became a Lesbian.”

— Bell Hooks

477. “It seems to me that the binary opposition that is so much embedded in Western thought and language makes it nearly impossible to project a complex response.”

— Bell Hooks

478. “What we as women need to ask ourselves is: “In what context within patriarchy do women create space where we can protect our genius?” It’s a very, very difficult question.”

— Bell Hooks

479. “If women and girls in patriarchal culture are taught to see every male, including the males with whom we are intimate, as potential rapists and murderers, then we cannot offer them our trust, and without trust there is no love.”

— Bell Hooks

480. “Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love.”

— Bell Hooks

481. “Of course many white people are comfortable with a rhetoric of race that suggests racism cannot be changed, that all white people are “inherently racist” simply because they are born and raised in this society. Such misguided thinking socializes white people both to remain ignorant of the way in which white supremacist attitudes are learned and to assume a posture of learned helplessness as though they have no agency – no capacity to resist this thinking.”

— Bell Hooks

482. “If you do not love yourself, you will be unable to love anyone else.”

— Bell Hooks

483. “Boys brutalized and victimized by patriarchy more often than not become patriarchal, embodying the abusive patriarchal masculinity that they once clearly recognized as evil. Few men brutally abused as boys in the name of patriarchal maleness courageously resist the brainwashing and remain true to themselves. Most males conform to patriarchy in one way or another.”

— Bell Hooks

484. “Despite the contemporary visionary feminist thinking that makes clear that a patriarchal thinker need not be a male, most folks continue to see men as the problem of patriarchy. This is simply not the case. Women can be as wedded to patriarchal thinking and action as men.”

— Bell Hooks

485. “Ultimately, cynicism is the great mask of the disappointed and betrayed heart.”

— Bell Hooks

486. “Black liberation struggle must be re-visioned so that it is no longer equated with maleness. We need a revolutionary vision of black liberation, one that emerges from a feminist standpoint and addresses the collective plight of black people.”

— Bell Hooks

487. “Batterer, he observes that there are few male models for grieving, and he emphasizes that “men in particular seem incapable of grieving and mourning on an individual basis.”

— Bell Hooks

488. “Just as the 19th century conflict over black male suffrage versus woman suffrage had placed black women in a difficult position, contemporary black women felt they were asked to choose between a black movement that primarily served the interests of black male patriarchs and a women’s movement which primarily served the interests of racist white women.”

— Bell Hooks

489. “From the onset, reformist white women with class privilege were well aware that the power and freedom they wanted was the freedom they perceived men of their class enjoying.”

— Bell Hooks

490. “Many working men in our culture can barely read or write. Imagine if time away from work could be spent in exciting literacy programs for poor and working-class men. Imagine a wage offered for this work of self-development. When patriarchy no longer rules the day, it will be possible for men to view themselves holistically, to see work as part of life, not their whole existence.”

— Bell Hooks

491. “So many of us have felt that we could win male love by showing we were willing to bear the pain, that we were willing to live our lives affirming that the maleness deemed truly manly because it withholds, withdraws, refuses is the maleness we desire. We learn to love men more because they will not love us. If they dared to love us, in patriarchal culture they would cease to be real “men.”

— Bell Hooks

492. “Most men feel that they receive love and therefore know what it feels like to be loved; women often feel we are in a constant state of yearning, wanting love but not receiving it.”

— Bell Hooks

493. “How can any girl sustain the belief that she is loved, truly loved, when all around her she sees that femaleness is despised? Unable to change the fact of femaleness, she strives to make herself over, to become someone worthy of love.”

— Bell Hooks

494. “Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up. As we move toward our desired destination we chart the journey, creating a map. We need a map to guide us on our journey to love – starting with the place where we know what we mean when we speak of love.”

— Bell Hooks

495. “Work can and should be life-enhancing for all men. When daring men come to work loved and loving, the nature of work will be transformed and the workplace will no longer demand that the hearts of men be broken to get the job done.”

— Bell Hooks

496. “This same politics of greed is at play when folks seek love. They often want fulfillment immediately. Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know genuine love we must invest time and commitment.”

— Bell Hooks

497. “It in no way diminishes our concern about racist oppression for us to acknowledge that our human experience is so complex that we cannot understand it if we only understand racism. Fighting against sexist oppression is important for black liberation, for as long as sexism divides black women and men we cannot concentrate our energies on resisting racism.”

— Bell Hooks

498. “Death is among us. To see it always and only as a negative subject is to lose sight of its power to enhance every moment.”

— Bell Hooks

499. “Poems of lamentation allow the melancholic loss that never truly disappears to be given voice. Like a slow solemn musical refrain played again and again, they call us to remember and mourn, to know again that as we work for change our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting.”

— Bell Hooks

500. “When poetry stirs in my imagination it is almost always from an indirect place, where language is abstract, where the mood and energy is evocative of submerged emotional intelligence and experience.”

— Bell Hooks