Top 500 Bell Hooks Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”

— Bell Hooks

52. “People with healthy self-esteem do not need to create pretend identities.”

— Bell Hooks

53. “The capacity to love is tied to being able to be awake, to being able to move out of yourself and be with someone else in a manner that is not about your desire to possess them, but to be with them, to be in union and communion.”

— Bell Hooks

54. “To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility.”

— Bell Hooks

55. “The most basic activism we can have in our lives is to live consciously in a nation living in fantasies. Living consciously is living with a core of healthy self-esteem. You will face reality, you will not delude yourself.”

— Bell Hooks

56. “We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.”

— Bell Hooks

57. “Whenever domination is present, love is lacking.”

— Bell Hooks

58. “Spirituality and spiritual life give us the strength to love.”

— Bell Hooks

59. “Contrary to what we may have been taught to think, unnecessary and unchosen suffering wounds us but need not scar us for life. It does mark us. What we allow the mark of our suffering to become is in our own hands.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

61. “I am passionate about everything in my life – first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society. – bell hooks.”

— Bell Hooks

62. “All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm’s way.”

— Bell Hooks

63. “Feminism has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually – women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority.”

— Bell Hooks

64. “Our freedom is sweet. It will be sweeter when we are all free.”

— Bell Hooks

65. “Representation is a crucial location of struggle for any exploited and oppressed people asserting subjectivity and decolonization of the mind.”

— Bell Hooks

66. “Of all the definitions of love that abound in our universe, a special favorite of mine is “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth”.”

— Bell Hooks

67. “Whether we’re talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it’s where the learning is.”

— Bell Hooks

68. “Stereotypes abound when there is distance. They are an invention, a pretense that one knows when the steps that would make real knowing possible cannot be taken or are not allowed.”

— Bell Hooks

69. “Justice is possible without equality, I believe, because of compassion and understanding. If I have compassion, then if I have more than you, which is unequal, I will still do the just thing by you.”

— Bell Hooks

70. “To me, a woman can’t be a feminist just because she is a woman. She is a feminist because she begins to divest herself of sexist ways of thinking and revolutionizes her consciousness.”

— Bell Hooks

71. “The rage of the oppressed is never the same as the rage of the privileged.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

73. “It’s in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. Past the ego.”

— Bell Hooks

74. “Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.”

— Bell Hooks

75. “Within a capitalist consumer society, the cult of personality has the power to subsume ideas, to make the person, the personality into the product and not the work itself.”

— Bell Hooks

76. “There must exist a paradigm, a practical model for social change that includes an understanding of ways to transform consciousness that are linked to efforts to transform structures.”

— Bell Hooks

77. “A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers – the experience of knowing we always belong.”

— Bell Hooks

78. “A good teacher is someone who can help you to get back to a teacher within.”

— Bell Hooks

79. “If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.”

— Bell Hooks

80. “Embracing love ethic means that we utilize all dimensions of love – “care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect and knowledge” – in our everyday lives.”

— Bell Hooks

81. “When men and women punish each other for truth telling, we reinforce the notion that lies are better.”

— Bell Hooks

82. “Knowing love or the hope of knowing love is the anchor that keeps us from falling into that sea of despair.”

— Bell Hooks

83. “I came to theory because I was hurting – the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend – to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.”

— Bell Hooks

84. “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

85. “The power of patriarchy has been to make maleness feared and to make men feel that it is better to be feared that to be loved. Whether they can confess this or not, men know that just is not true.”

— Bell Hooks

86. “In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimage is inevitable.”

— Bell Hooks

87. “The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is rather than the way we want to be.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

89. “To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending.”

— Bell Hooks

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

— Bell Hooks

91. “Love does have the power to redeem but only if we are ready for redemption. Love saves us only if we want to be saved.”

— Bell Hooks

92. “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

93. “Shame produces trauma. Trauma produces paralysis.”

— Bell Hooks

94. “And if one’s goal is self-recovery, to be well in one’s soul, honesty and realistically confronting loneliness is party of the healing process.”

— Bell Hooks

95. “Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive.”

— Bell Hooks

96. “Only love can heal the wounds of the past. However, the intensity of our woundedness often leads to a closing of the heart, making it impossible for us to give or receive the love that is given to us.”

— Bell Hooks

97. “The search for love continued even in the face of great odds.”

— Bell Hooks

98. “As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized.”

— Bell Hooks

99. “Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.”

— Bell Hooks

100. “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.”

— Bell Hooks